Total Film -February 2023

Ant-Man is a jokester. He’s a funny guy. And now you’ve got Scott Lang going up against Kang the Conqueror, who does not joke. He does have a sense of humour. And you’ll discover that. But he does not joke.” While Rudd and Reed bonded over New Romantic ’80s bands (Adam and the Ants was played on set, naturally) during the shoot, Majors brought a different energy. Like playing rap track ‘9mm’. “Which is essentially just like the hardest villain song,” he grins. “It’s got horn, it’s got the fanfare, the pomp and circumstance of a legion – Alexander the Great and Caesar and everybody – coming home. It’s just wicked. That song I would play on repeat cranked all the way up on set.” Kang is here to disrupt. Could he beat down Thanos? Reed has no hesitation: “My money is going to be on Kang.” Phase 5 better watch out. ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 17 FEBRUARY. the first of two Avengers movies that will bring Phase 6 to a close. Just glimpse Majors’ performance in the trailer and words like ‘gravitas’ and ‘intelligence’ spring to mind. “I mean, he’s hyper intelligent – it’s one of the superpowers,” agrees Majors. “His brain function is just greater than even the smart guys. He’s on that level. And the gravitas is a necessity. It’s Kang against the world, isn’t it? At least that’s his point of view.” According to producer Broussard, Majors referred to Kang’s personality with the phrase “No moves wasted”. In other words, he doesn’t do small talk or play around mischievously like Loki. “There’s no frivolity,” nods Majors. “Kang himself is very economical. He understands energy, he understands time, he understands what is needed to survive. He doesn’t suffer fools. Which is interesting because not to say anything pejorative about Ant-Man, but Things get a little odd in the Quantum Realm… FEBRUARY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 51 QUANTUMANIA

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THE CONTENDER Jonathan Majors’ rapid ascent is now going stratospheric as he picks a personal fight with Adonis Creed in CREED III and plays Kang the Conqueror in Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania. Both characters are formidable. But they are nothing next to the career goals he’s set himself… WORDS JAMIE GRAHAM When Jonathan Majors was 14 years old in Texas, he was pushing lawnmowers, selling candy at school, working two more jobs, and striving to be class president. The drive, he says, was just a part of him, and he now thanks his career for it – a career that’s accelerated at breakneck speed since turning heads in 2019’s award-winning indie drama The Last Black Man In San Francisco. Since then, Spike Lee’s drama Da 5 Bloods, HBO’s mystery horror Lovecraft Country, hip western The Harder They Fall and Marvel’s Loki have established his major credentials, and now he’s making the leap to bona fide movie star by playing the antagonists in both Creed III and Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania. So is he satiated? Hell, no – the drive is stronger than ever. “At 33 years old, I’m still full of piss and vinegar,” he says on Zoom from New York. “Maybe you should speak to my therapist about it. Listen, I live in a cool spot. And when I walk through the door, the guys are looking at me every time because I’m a young Black man living in a certain building. You know what I mean? I live here. I live here! It’s a very intimate group, but they can’t get it past their minds. I come in with my hood up, with my dogs. They’re like, ‘Excuse me?’ I’m like, ‘Guys, there’s only one Black man who lives here, and it’s me. I’m sorry, I’m an actor, and I change clothes. But it’s me, guys. It’s always going to be me.’” He shakes his head, upon which perches a flat cap. “Do I always have a chip on my shoulder? I’ve got the whole chip bag on my shoulder. It only grows the more I pay attention to what’s going on in the world.” FEBRUARY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 53 JONATHAN MAJORS

This drive, this anger, came in useful when Majors set about finding his character of Damian Anderson in the third Creed movie. Damian is a childhood friend of worldchampion boxer Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan). Imprisoned for years, he’s now freshly released, in fearsome shape, and is quick to remind his old pal just who was considered the better fighter in their youth. How is it that ‘Eye Of The Tiger’ goes? “Rising up, back on the street… Did my time…” Well, Damian certainly hasn’t lost his grip on the dreams of the past, and is intent on fighting just to keep them alive. He will change your passion for glory… Majors and Jordan – who produces and makes his directorial debut, as well as returning as Adonis – worked on the character of Damian together, building him from the ground up. Anderson is Majors’ paternal grandfather’s surname, and the actor poured himself, and his family upbringing, into the role. BOXING CLEVER “Although I was never incarcerated, I did deal with juvenile detention, in-school suspension, expulsions… all the way up until adulthood,” says Majors, who was arrested for shoplifting and disciplined for fighting during his school years. “So I understood that, you know? But my big connection to it was the fact that the man who raised me was an ex-con, as gross as the word is. He had been incarcerated for 15 years before we found each other. I believe that his sole purpose in my life was to get me to adulthood. My mother and him parted ways, but he still remained… I mean, he’s my stepfather. To this day, I see him as my stepdad, you know? So I understood, secondhand, the incarcerated mind. I witnessed it, what that development is.” The years of incarceration inform who Damian is, physically and mentally. It’s even there in his fighting style. Majors, a natural athlete who has always played sport to “a competitive level” and is “competitive with myself, as far as my body [is concerned]”, committed to “eight months of hard living and hard training” before shooting Creed III. But he was sculpting his brain, also. “That’s probably what me and Mike talked the most about,” he explains. “How is he going to fight? He’s quite unorthodox. It’s a mixture of prison survival and ancient pugilism. He’s a very smart fighter. Though he’s strong and visceral, he’s intelligent.” And hungry, right? “Yeah, he’s starving.” Again, it was something that Majors connected to. “I spent my time as a boy on a farm and in the hood, as we say in the States – you know, in council housing. That’s my upbringing, period. So I understand that hunger, and the engine it takes to be, quote unquote, ‘world champion’. That’s a big ‘I LOOKED AT SIDNEY POITIER AND PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN AND MERYL STREEP, AND WENT, “I’M GOING THERE.”’ Majors’ Kang the Conqueror is a big presence in the miniaturised world of Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania… …having already played He Who Remains, a variant of the character in Disney+ miniseries Loki. 54 | TOTAL FILM | FEBRUARY 2023 TALFILM.COM/SUBS SPOTLIGHT

that he met Ms. LJ, who taught theatre arts. Finding theatre to be a “safe space”, he made it to Yale Drama School and landed his first role while he was there, playing a gay-rights activist in 2017 miniseries When We Rise. Hop forward four short years and Majors was appearing in two episodes of Disney+ show Loki as He Who Remains, a variant of Kang the Conqueror, the most powerful being in the multiverse. His arresting appearance in Loki was the first small step of what promises to be a huge journey across the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Kang, the biggest bad since Thanos, is on villain duties in Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania and will then headline Avengers: The Kang Dynasty in May 2025. Quantumania opens Marvel’s Phase 5. The Kang Dynasty is the first of two Avengers movies that will close out Phase 6. No pressure, then… “Initially, I couldn’t believe it,” says Majors. “I come from the theatre, which, in some cultures, could seem anathema to the MCU stage, so it was completely bizarre to be approached. But I found out very quickly that it was a very thought-out choice on their part. And any trepidation I had about being able to actually do the work that I so desperately want engine, and that takes a lot of horsepower. I connected on that – to show people one’s worth; to be worthy, you know?” It’s a ravenous hunger that could take Damian all the way to the title, especially given that Creed, like Rocky Balboa in Rocky III, is enjoying a life of luxury. Just look what happened there: Clubber Lang (Mr. T) showed Rocky how a life of silk pyjamas can lead to nightmares in the ring. Major nods. “Adonis Creed is very much a part of the system in this film. He is a part of the machinery. At the top, you can become lax. That’s very much a part of the arc that Adonis is dealing with in the picture. He then reverts, and becomes more spiritual. He begins to remember where he comes from. And that’s the real battle.” KANG YOU DIG IT Majors, the middle of three children, spent his early years on a California air-force base where his father worked. When he was nine, his father left, and the family moved to Texas. Money struggles led him into shoplifting, and it was as an adolescent in juvenile detention Damian (Jonathan Majors) and Adonis (Michael B. Jordan) reconnect after Damian is released from prison. to do and create the art that I so desperately want to create…” He offers a smile of contentment. “I was really gonna be fostered within the MCU, and within this company of creatives.” An imposing figure of great intelligence and tremendous gravitas, Kang the Conqueror will clash in all sorts of intriguing ways with Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang aka AntMan. For Majors, it’s a gig so huge it makes Rudd’s Giant-Man in Civil War’s airport dust-up seem positively miniscule. So did he seek any advice from his Creed III director and co-star Jordan, who of course rocked the MCU as the ferociously noble Killmonger in Black Panther? “No, I didn’t, and I don’t really believe in that,” he says. “Every man, every artist, everyone has their own experience on it. I don’t really care what someone else’s experience is because, for me, at this level...” He weighs his words. “I’m in two huge blockbusters about to hit cinemas. For me and my mental health, I can’t compare. There’s no other outcome than a good experience that I can expect. I don’t want to open myself up to any warnings or any trepidation, or someone else’s point of view or trauma around an event, a person, et cetera. I do my best work when I feel secure. Where I feel secure enough to be dangerous. Or I feel safe enough to be daring. I don’t want anybody else in my head.” Majors’ head is a positive space. Not easy to daunt, he is hungry for challenges and ready to meet them. His work, he feels, carries with it a great responsibility, and he looks to the past even as he strides into the future. “What’s been gifted, what’s been earned… I’m participating in that, and moving it forward,” he starts. “I think about Sidney Poitier. It’ll be on me to build the next thing, you know? I’ve got a long way to go, but I will only be ripped and 6ft for so long. There will be individuals coming behind me, and I have to challenge them now, you know? Hopefully what we do with The Kang Dynasty; what we do in the MCU; what we do in these Adonis movies… Hopefully they go, ‘That is now the pole star. That is what we’re aiming for now’. In the same way I looked at Denzel [Washington] and Sidney Poitier and Philip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep and Daniel Day-Lewis, and went, ‘I’m going there.’” It’s not arrogance. It’s focus, it’s belief, it’s that aforementioned drive. His feet are planted. And besides, it’s impossible to get a big head when you have a young daughter and four dogs to look after. “I’ve got some cheat sheets [to stay grounded],” he grins. “I’m raising a human being. That’s a real thing. And I walk my dogs, pick up dog shit. That’ll do it.” CREED III OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 3 MARCH. ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA DISNEY/MARVEL STUDIOS, METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER STUDIOS/WARNER BROS. OPENS ON 17 FEBRUARY. FEBRUARY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 55 JONATHAN MAJORS

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Upcoming thriller Sharper transports us to a Manhattan filled with secrets, lies and long cons. Total Film gets embroiled in 2023’s most secretive press tour, as the cast led by Julianne Moore and Sebastian Stan explain why its twists con-stitute a must-see event. WORDS LEILA LATIF FEBRUARY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 57

t’s not unusual for a film’s publicity team to set boundaries regarding what details film journalists can and cannot reveal ahead of release. But the Sharper team take it one step further, with director Benjamin Caron and actors Julianne Moore, Sebastian Stan, Justice Smith and Briana Middleton, all wanting personal assurances that Total Film will not spoil any of the thriller’s many twists. “I don’t know how you guys are going to write about it!” laughs Caron. “But we need to protect this story as much as possible”. When Moore is reassured the plot will be kept secret even if she accidentally lets something slip, she relaxes. “I appreciate that,” she says. “It’s challenging to talk in this interview because I don’t want to mention… [redacted].” Suffice to say, at Total Film we are total pros, and not in the business of dropping spoilers (even when we haven’t been begged to by the cast). We can reveal that the new Apple TV+ thriller has its roots in some of Caron’s favourite movies like Klute and Ma^MahfZly<khpg:__Zbk (1968), as a group of Manhattanites plot their way to the top. It can also be revealed that Moore plays Madeline, the elegant partner of a billionaire who slinks into each room in perfectly tailored silk ensembles as if she’s gliding through melted butter. Stan, meanwhile, plays charming con man, Max, in a role that, he says, “reminded me of movies like The Usual Suspects or a darker Ocean’s Eleven.” Stan’s much-beloved portrayal of Bucky Barnes sharply contrasts with devious Max and further establishes Stan as one of Hollywood’s most intriguing leading men. He grins as TF reminds him of some of the more morally dubious entries in his filmography, from cannibals to abusive husbands to Mötley Crüe’s Tommy Lee. “It’s not just wanting to play dirtbags!” he insists. “The director and your co-stars are, for me, the biggest piece of the puzzle.” His Oscar-winning co-star Julianne Moore, who also acts as a producer, is about as bona fide a movie star as they come, and her star power helped bring Sharper from page to screen. She credits her success to refusing to be boxed in by what a Julianne Moore role is expected to be. “A lot of the time I get told, ‘I thought of you for this script,’ and they’ll send it to you, but they thought of me because of something I just did.” Moore, instead, is drawn to projects that surprise audiences and herself. Her manager introduced her to Sharper writers Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka with an accurate sense that they’d get along. That their script was already on the 2020 Black List of the best unproduced screenplays was not the pull. Instead, she was drawn to how unexpected a film and a role it was, with her character Madeline proving fascinatingly mercurial. “I want to be surprised,” says the actor, who has stunned as everything from a porn star in Boogie Nights to a dystopian leader in The Hunger Games. “Usually, having been doing this for as long as I’ve been doing it, you can get ahead of the screenplay, and I see what’s being set up. But when I read it, I really didn’t see… [redacted] coming.” GUE$$ WORK That unpredictable nature is what her co-star, up-and-comer Briana Middleton, sees in Moore. “As an actor, [she] has this poise and refinement, but also at the same time, this raw, unpredictable feeling that at any moment something completely different can happen,” says Middleton. And while Moore wanted to keep the glamorous Madeline “unsettling” and “complicated”, she was keen that in rehearsals the cast’s performances weren’t concerned with “telegraphing later action, which human beings don’t do”. But in the rehearsal, she was reassured as her co-stars brought out so many unexpected elements in the characters. “That’s one of the exciting things about having a little time to prepare, actors’ abilities are revealed to you in a different way. I was watching Phillip [Johnson Richardson], who plays Tipsy, and he’s so adorable,” she beams. Perhaps just as staggering as any of the twists in Sharper is the slow realisation that Middleton, during her Zoom interview with Total Film, is lying face down and getting a tattoo. She speaks of her love and admiration for the “optimism” and “resilience” of her character, Sandra – high praise from a person APPLE “Hmm… I’ll take the lot”: Julianne Moore plays the mercurial Madeline. 58 | TOTAL FILM | FEBRUARY 2023 TALFILM.COM/SUBS MAKING OF

calmly doing press while buzzing needles are dragged across their skin. Caron describes her as “the heart of the movie” and had a specific brief when it came to casting her, insisting on, “an unknown actress potentially at the beginning of an amazing movie career, and a person of colour.” The hunt proved to be a short one. “We found her first,” says Caron. “I saw Briana’s audition tape. I knew immediately that we’d found her. It’s the same thing when I saw Emma Corrin for Ma^<khpg, and it just was Diana.” We are introduced to Sandra at a bookshop, where she meets dashing owner Tom (Justice Smith) and sparks fly. For the first act, Sharper seems to have more in common with You’ve Got Mail than Klute, but neither Tom nor Sandra are what they first appear, and by the time the second chapter begins, Stan’s manipulative Max appears and the film enters full-blown thriller mode. Smith (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom) auditioned having “read the script in one sitting. Which is saying a lot for my distractedass brain.” But while the sweet bookstore owner in the script always had his secrets, through the rehearsal process Smith was given the freedom to “massage it a little and improv around it to make sense to my brain. The arc of the character stayed consistent except one big moment changed, and that’s the moment where things got really, really dark for Tom.” But even with deception and betrayal at every corner, not all the characters are afforded the same agency and can escape this tangled web. “Sandra didn’t choose this,” Middleton points out. “She’s just trying to get by and this is the situation that she’s been put in. The choices she’s making are about survival.” This is in sharp contrast to Stan’s Max, who is more nakedly greedy, but whose duplicitous nature seems to speak to a complex but damaged psyche, albeit one that remains mysterious. “There’s no remorse scene or redemption scene where you now understand why this character’s doing what he’s doing,” says Stan. “Max remains very elusive.” DIRECT LINE While Sharper’s director is an established force in prestige TV like :g]hk and Ma^<khpg, Caron makes progressing to a first feature film sound simple. “It was incredibly straightforward and happened really quickly,” he says. Even now, as the film is about to debut, he speaks with a level of disbelief. “Everyone tells you making movies is really hard!” he laughs. But rather than toil for years to sell his vision, when ‘IT REMINDED ME OF MOVIES LIKE THE USUAL SUSPECTS’ SEBASTIAN STAN Briana Middleton and Justice Smith as the couple drawn into a world of secrets and lies. TOTALFILM.COM FEBRUARY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 59 SHARPER

Caron came to the project, the money was already in place; Moore, A24 and Apple had signed on, and soon Caron and his family would be in New York scarcely able to believe their luck. “My sister Jody co-produced the film,” he says. “We’re two kids that grew up in a pub in the Midlands, and suddenly we’re in Manhattan making a movie with Julianne Moore.” While in the movie-making business Caron believes in “a healthy dose of scepticism”, his resilience was tested on the rocky road to casting Max, which he discusses with refreshing candour. “It’s probably a dirty secret, but I haven’t seen any Marvel movies,” he admits. “My kids are quite young, so my excuse is I’ll watch them when they’re older, but I had seen Sebastian in I, Tonya. He was brilliant.” When it comes to the slippery but alluring Max, Carron identified in Stan “this ability to inhabit these dualisms while commanding this emotional investment. It’s a great skill. And he’s terrifically committed to exploring that truth of the story.” Caron seems to briefly run out of adjectives to praise Stan’s performance and shrugs, “I love him. I love him.” But the director and current president of the Sebastian Stan fan club breaks a cardinal rule by freely admitting Stan wasn’t actually his first choice. His first offer went to Nicholas Hoult after a productive walk around Wormwood Scrubs (“the park where I spent most of lockdown”). Unfortunately, filming clashed with Hoult’s fine-dining satire The Menu. Next up was Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who Caron spent “this mad morning with where we dropped our kids off at school and just shared stories”. But with Taylor-Johnson’s director wife Sam scheduled to shoot abroad at the same time, it meant childcare anchored the actor on the wrong side of the Atlantic. Caron’s luck seemed to turn around when indie darling Christopher Abbott adored the script, but not long after he seemed locked in, the director got a call with the dreaded words, “I’ve got an offer from Yorgos Lanthimos.” Ever the humble English gent, Caron found himself saying, “Fuck! I can’t compete with Yorgos! You should just go and do that film.” With the shoot fast approaching, it seemed like Caron’s love of experimental Greek filmmaking may have shot him in the foot. “It was painful because you get excited about actors, and now I had no one,” Caron recalls. Thankfully a phone call came that Stan loved the script, and his former co-stars Vanessa Kirby and Denise Gough, who Caron had directed in Ma^<khpg and :g]hk respectively, spoke to him about “how brilliant Sebastian SEBASTIAN STAN Confidence Man How are you finding talking Sharper while keeping its secrets? It’s very difficult knowing how much to reveal. I want to preserve how I felt when I read it of sudden onion layers being peeled back. How did you prepare for all of Max’s layers? I read about con people in general, and how strategy and vulnerability are a big part of getting what they want. Gaslighting and abuse is a lot like that. It’s terrible. But con artists are also very much like undercover agents, and I have studied undercover agents in the past. They’re still human and can lose track of emotions and believe their lies. It’s more than the most obvious conclusion that they are just sociopaths. Max doesn’t seem like a sociopath… He’s not. Ben and I created a backstory for him, and part of the fun was going home to sit around and dream and read and put a compilation of things together that made sense of this person. And getting to watch Julianne work on the script and create our character’s backstory was basically like an acting class and script-analysis class with one of the best actors in the world. With such complex characters, did you find your allegiances shifting? When I read it, I found myself rooting for different characters for different reasons. There’s all kinds of angles to John Lithgow’s character, and to Max and Madeline and so on. So I’d be rooting for a character and then realise later they’re actually way worse than the one I was against. Did that shift again once you watched the film? It did. And there was something fun in that you’ve got to almost watch it twice. The first time you’re just sort of downloading information that’s coming at you and trying to keep up with what’s going on. But then if you watch it again, you will see throughout that there are clues in the performances and in these little moments that now take on a totally different meaning. LL ‘THERE HAS TO BE AN ELEMENT OF ADDICTION TO THE THRILL’ JULIANNE MOORE Con-quistador Madeline ensnares billionaire Richard. 60 | TOTAL FILM | FEBRUARY 2023 TALFILM.COM/SUBS

is, and that our ways of working were totally in tune”. At the end of long Zoom, it was clear that he’d found the right actor to play Max. Watching the film it’s hard to imagine the role wasn’t written for Stan. Caron agrees. “He just gets Max and why he’s a seductive proposition. The performance is audacious. It’s smart, it’s inventive, but it’s also got vulnerability in a precarious balance.” WICKED GAME The structure of the film is almost as intriguing a puzzle box as the characters’ motives. As well as being non-linear, the film switches perspectives and pairs Tom and Sandra; Sandra and Max; Max and Madeline and so on, until the entire ensemble comes together for an explosive climax. This meant the cast had to create consistently tangible chemistry across all these pairings, something Caron’s theatre background emphasised in rehearsals. “With the two-handers, I’d have the actors play them with the previous person in the room watching so that they would feel the energy.” A few weeks’ rehearsal is a luxury in film, but Caron’s theatrical exercises had served him well in the past, particularly in Ma^<khpg where he’d have the actors playing Diana and Camilla rehearse scenes while the actor playing Charles would have his hand on the table, and they would have to compete to be the one person with their hand on his. “With Sharper, we played those sorts of games in rehearsal,” smiles Caron. “Then when you start filming, you bring your cast in full of confidence.” While the characters in Sharper aren’t royalty, there is a comparable level of wealth and privilege at play (John Lithgow also appears as a ruthless hedge-fund billionaire). Smith grew up “on welfare and living in motels on the weekend” but much like several of the characters, he had proximity to wealth by “going to a charter school and being surrounded by the offspring of incredibly wealthy tycoons”. While Smith’s character Tom’s fortunes change throughout the film, the actor found himself finally able to understand how, while his family struggled, his wealthy friends could sincerely complain about how much they hated being rich. “It clicked for me when doing Sharper that there is a guilt that comes with so much privilege,” he says. “Guilt can easily spearhead a cycle of self-invalidation and, in Tom’s case, desperation.” And for Moore, it wasn’t about a straightforward pursuit of riches. Rather, deep introspection into the psychology of their characters was necessary for the mechanics of the plot to make sense. “I’m interested in behaviour, in how people communicate with each other,” she says. “Why do people get involved in a cult or involved in these schemes? There has to be a deep sense of pleasure. Let’s face it, there are lots of easier ways to live than the way these characters choose. There has to be an element of addiction to the thrill.” But Sharper’s depiction of wealth and power has a distinctly political element. The ethics around the pursuit of money are dubious, but the ethics of breaking the law are more ambiguous as the rules are seemingly there to uphold the elite’s status quo. At any point in Sharper, the most sympathetic character is rarely the most law-abiding one, but to say much more would be breaking a promise to Moore as well as ruining much of the fun. When Caron finally got to see the film with test audiences, he saw just what a great time not seeing the twists coming can be. “It was terrifying,” he admits. “You have to expose your entire body, brain, and soul to 300 randomly selected people from across America. But when… [redacted], it was amazing. I saw smoke coming out of people’s heads.” To maximise Sharper’s impact, Smith recommends following the route of his friends “who love movies and never even watch trailers because they are so committed to the surprise of storytelling”. And for those who do need any convincing to watch, he has the perfect sell: “If you like watching fucked-up people do fucked-up things to each other for money and power, then you’ll love this movie.” SHARPER WILL OPEN IN SELECT CINEMAS, AND STREAMS ON APPLE TV+ FROM 17 FEBRUARY. Nothing is as it seems in Sharper’s world. Director Benjamin Caron with Middleton and Sebastian Stan on set. TOTALFILM.COM FEBRUARY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 61 SHARPER

TF LIST

Not all horror movies are gore and monsters and slashing knives. It’s time to stop being so snobby… and, after reading this, to perhaps update your own list of the greatest horror films ever made. WORDS JAMIE GRAHAM sk any self-respecting horror fan what they think of terms like ‘elevated horror’ and ‘social thriller’ and they’re sure to spit blood. Such nomenclature, which has been applied over the last decade to movies like The Witch, The Babadook, Hereditary, Get Out, Relic and Saint Maud, are loaded with the patronising implication that ‘normal’ horror is base. These terms are used by marketing bods (and, sadly, film journalists) who think that traditional horror is all about masked maniacs knifing teenagers (not that we’re opposed to that kind of film), and that any genre effort exploring such serious themes as grief and mental illness, loneliness and faith, race and gender, must be hoisted clear of the cesspool. In truth, horror’s always done it. Try on Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) or George A. Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead (1968) for size – they fit like a dress made by Buffalo Bill. Or check out the sophistication of Val Lewton’s genre movies for RKO Pictures in the 1940s (Cat People, I Walked With A Zombie, etc.) and James Whale’s horror films for Universal in the 1930s (Frankenstein, Bride Of Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man). And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. So instead of stealing titles away from the genre, how about we give something back by highlighting 10 classics that can rightfully be tagged as horror but never/rarely are? HORROR FILMS

FIGHT CLUB1999 THE FILM David Fincher’s unflinching adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel sees two guys (Edward Norton’s buttoned-down Narrator and Brad Pitt’s charismatic Tyler Durden) start underground fisticuffs to shake up themselves and society. Fight Club flopped on release, with audiences expecting a punchy action movie rather than a ballsy, midnightblack satire on middle-class masculinity. WHY HORROR? The Narrator and Tyler Durden turn out to be one and the same, a long-term horror trope that’s most famously used in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), in which mild-mannered Norman Bates talks to his mother and dresses up as her to flush Marion Crane’s life down the plughole. “You’re Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Jackass!” says Fight Club’s Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), and Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella similarly saw the respectable Jekyll unleash his id in the form of Hyde to act out his darkest impulses. All Fincher/Palahniuk do is give the concept a postmodern makeover. Viewed now, Fight Club is scarier than ever – and remarkably prescient, with the misplaced rage that fuels Project Mayhem (culminating in skyscrapers collapsing) anticipating the rise of the far right, incel subculture and the radicalisation of terrorists. MULHOLLAND DR. 2001 THE FILM Wannabe actress Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) arrives in Los Angeles from Deep River, Ontario to discover first an amnesiac, Rita (Laura Harring), holed up in her house, and then pools of darkness lurking between all those twinkling lights. The City of Angels has its demons, which Betty learns as masks slip and identities shift. WHY HORROR? Tagged as a drama, a mystery and a thriller by IMDb, Mulholland Dr. is all of those things, as well as featuring elements of musicals and, especially, film noir. But it’s also, undoubtedly, a horror movie, with a sustained atmosphere of dreamlike dread as the camera creeps down passageways and along walls to round corners (on one occasion, the sudden appearance of a homeless man offers one of cinema’s finest jump scares). Director David Lynch has always operated with one foot in the horror genre – few films or TV shows unnerve like Eraserhead, Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet and Lost Highway – and his ability to conjure disquietude and distress out of spaces and soundscapes is matched only by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, whose Kairo (aka Pulse) represents the apex of J-horror. 64 | TOTAL FILM | FEBRUARY 2023 SUBSCRIBE AT WWW.TOTALFILM.COM/SUBS TF LIST

THERE WILL BE BLOOD2007 THE FILM Oilman Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) sinks his gigantic straw into the Californian desert and slurps up that liquid-gold milkshake. WHY HORROR? From the ornate, ominous title to Jonny Greenwood’s dissonant, string-led score, Paul Thomas Anderson’s foundation myth screams horror film. And it doesn’t stop there, with PTA making use of the doppelganger/evil-twin trope that’s a favourite of the genre (the former can be found in Edgar Allan Poe’s William Wilson and Roger Corman’s The Masque Of The Red Death, the latter in Vincent Price vehicle The Haunted Palace and Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers): pastor Eli Sunday is identical to his brother Paul, while the pair never being seen together adds another disconcerting layer. Plainview is a vampire, sucking the land dry. He also gorges on Eli and the townsfolk of Little Boston, and discards his ‘son’, H.W. (Dillon Freasier), when he’s no longer of use. Those final scenes of Plainview in his mansion evoke Jack Torrance in the Overlook Hotel as much as Charles Foster Kane in Xanadu. “Do you view There Will Be Blood as a horror film?” TF asked Anderson in 2010. “Absolutely,” he said. “He’s Dracula in his fucking castle.” JAWS 1975 THE FILM As coastal resort Amity Island gears up for its Fourth of July celebrations, a great white shark starts munching swimmers. WHY HORROR? Usually thought of as a boy’s-ownadventure tale, propulsive and thrilling, and as a summer blockbuster – indeed, the movie that launched the modern blockbuster – Jaws is, in fact, a good old-fashioned monster movie. Like Val Lewton’s shadowy horror pictures of the ’40s, Jaws keeps its beast hidden for much of the running time (albeit because mechanical shark Bruce malfunctioned during the shoot), and Steven Spielberg serves up two perfect jump scares: the head rolling out of the sunken boat, and the shark bursting up to take a mouthful of chum. Jaws can also be seen as part of the Nature Takes Revenge cycle of horror movies that was big in the ’70s (Frogs, Night Of The Lepus, Squirm, Empire Of The Ants, Kingdom Of The Spiders, Long Weekend), though it lacks the ecological subtext common to those films. And don’t forget that Spielberg has exhibited a fondness for horror throughout his illustrious career, both as director (Duel, Jurassic Park) and producer (Gremlins, Poltergeist, Paranormal Activity). BLACK SWAN2010 THE FILM Fragile ballet dancer Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) is pushed to her limit and beyond by her overbearing mother (Barbara Hershey) and her mentor/director (Vincent Cassel) when she lands the dual roles of the white and black swans, Odette and Odile, in a production of Swan Lake. WHY HORROR? Marketed as a drama and a psychological thriller – the latter being a long-favoured tag for horror films desiring to be taken seriously – Darren Aronofsky’s hysterical offering actually throws several horror sub-genres into the grinder. Mental disintegration, doppelgangers, body horror, werewolves (or rather wereswans, as Nina’s toes web and black feathers push through her skin)… all swirl deliriously as our heroine’s punished body cracks and snaps, and her mind splinters. Along with Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, Dario Argento’s hyper-intense, hallucinatory Suspiria - set in a ballet school - is a touchstone, as are Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, The Tenant and Rosemary’s Baby. “The word [horror]… people associate it with gore films,” explained Aronofsky. “I just do what I do, and try to be original… But we were very interested in scaring the audience, so we’d talk about new ways to go ‘Boo!’” 20TH CENTURY STUDIOS, MIR AMAX, SEARCHLIGHT, UNIVERSAL TOTALFILM.COM FEBRUARY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 65 HORROR FILMS

PERSONA1966 THE FILM Stage actress Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullmann) stops speaking in the middle of a performance. In the grip of a breakdown, she’s nursed by Alma (Bibi Andersson) at an isolated summer home. Alma chatters, Elisabet listens, and the two women’s identities begin to merge. WHY HORROR? It’s widely agreed that Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman made just the single horror film, Hour Of The Wolf, but the genre haunts several of his titles: The Magician, The Virgin Spring (Wes Craven’s blueprint for The Last House On The Left), The Silence (seeds of The Shining), Cries And Whispers, and Fanny And Alexander. Persona is a cabin-in-the-woods (or rather, cabin-on-the-coast) tale exploring what men find most terrifying of all – female identity. Elisabet subsumes Alma (perhaps her greatest performance, and certainly an act of emotional vampirism) and the film takes place in a liminal dream space… or rather, nightmare space. Written by Bergman during a bout of double pneumonia, Persona explores the “hunger” of his artistic creativity, and how his “bag of tricks” is rendered meaningless by real-world atrocities – images of Vietnam are seen on a television. Its tale of warring/melding women influenced Altman’s 3 Women, Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. and Rose Glass’ Saint Maud. TAXI DRIVER1976 THE FILM Lonely Vietnam vet Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) takes a job driving a cab all over New York City. “All the animals come out at night,” muses his voiceover. “Whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies. Sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” WHY HORROR? Normally categorised as a drama, Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece rejects such neat labelling. Shot on location during the hot summer of ’75, the nighttime atmosphere was, said Scorsese, like a “seeping virus”. It slicks every frame of a film that occupies a twilight zone between fevered fantasy and grim reality, as Bickle’s mind slides into paranoia and madness – a staple of horror – as surely as his cab glides through steam rising from subway grates (Taxi Driver’s equivalent to mist in a Universal monster movie). “The idea was to make a cross between a Gothic horror and the New York Daily News,” said Scorsese, who’s also made reference to Travis being like a nosferatu in a yellow coffin. Only The Texas Chain Saw Massacre so captures the sickness of an America torn apart by civil-rights riots, political assassinations, the oil embargo, the Watergate scandal and, of course, Vietnam. AB SVENSK FILMINDUSTRI, COLUMBIA PICTURES, ORION PICTURES, UNITED ARTISTS, WARNER BROS 66 | TOTAL FILM | FEBRUARY 2023 SUBSCRIBE AT WWW.TOTALFILM.COM/SUBS TF LIST

HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN2004 THE FILM The third Harry Potter movie sees crazed criminal Sirius Black (Gary Oldman) on the loose, and Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry guarded by the wraithlike Dementors. WHY HORROR? Each new Potter film was sold as being “darker” and “more adult” than the last, as Voldemort grew stronger and so did the kids’ hormones. But it was Prisoner Of Azkaban that made the biggest leap, with safe director Chris Columbus (Home Alone, Mrs. Doubtfire) replaced by curveball choice Alfonso Cuarón (Great Expectations, Y Tu Mamá También). The source material was already tinged with horror – new Defence Against the Dark Arts professor Remus Lupin is a werewolf – but Cuarón leaned in hard. The frankly terrifying scene of Dementors searching the Hogwarts Express quickly establishes that he’s not here to mess around, while the attention he pays to the changing seasons and Hogwarts’ grounds, including the Dark Forest, bring a folk-horror vibe to the action. Even the obligatory quidditch match is a storm-lashed affair. And making things spookier still is Hogwarts’ Frog Choir singing ‘Double Trouble’ (“Something wicked this way comes!”) over the wintry landscapes. Like Poltergeist, Prisoner Of Azkaban is a horror movie designed to scare parents and children alike. THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS1991 THE FILM In order to catch skin-flaying serial killer Buffalo Bill, trainee FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) must pick the brains of incarcerated sophisticate/nutjob Hannibal ‘The Cannibal’ Lecter (Anthony Hopkins). WHY HORROR? Did you miss the bit about the skinflaying serial killer and the cannibal? Of course Jonathan Demme’s much-loved classic is a horror film, and that’s before you consider the Gothic chamber that imprisons Lecter, the blood-drenched, Grand Guignol set-pieces and that climactic night-vision sequence. Demme began his career in exploitation flicks under Roger Corman, and this is another gaudy, gory B-movie, only masquerading as quality mainstream entertainment. It fooled the notoriously snobby Academy, who don’t award horror movies, and thought they gave Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Adapted Screenplay to a crime drama/psychological thriller. It fooled journalists too, with many articles claiming that Get Out, in 2018, was the first horror film to be nominated for Best Picture since The Exorcist in 1974, overlooking not just Lambs but also Jaws, The Sixth Sense and Black Swan. “With The Silence Of The Lambs, we wanted to create this extraordinary mood of dread and suspense,” said Demme. APOCALYPSE NOW1979 THE FILM In the midst of the Vietnam War, Captain Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen) is tasked with travelling up the Nung River to assassinate the renegade Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) with extreme prejudice. WHY HORROR? There’s a jump scare involving a pouncing tiger in the jungle, and Kurtz, when finally encountered, cleaves to shifting shadows like Dracula. But that’s just Halloween window dressing. The real reason that Francis Ford Coppola’s extraordinary war picture can be viewed as a horror film is down to its gonzo, hallucinatory visuals – forests going up in flames, Vietnamese civilians bombed to Wagner’s ‘Ride Of The Valkyries’, decapitated heads, the execution of Kurtz intercut with the ritualistic (real-life) slaying of a water buffalo – and the fact that it transposes Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness to Vietnam. Conrad’s novel parallels an outward odyssey and an inner journey, the latter tracking a descent into Hell as our protagonist discovers the beast within. Every frame of Apocalypse Now is drenched with delirium and madness, while death, dished with glee, is also everywhere you look – and is there anything more horrific than humanity losing its humanity? “The horror, the horror,” mumbles Kurtz as he cradles his head. Indeed. TOTALFILM.COM FEBRUARY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 67 HORROR FILMS

Playing like a Golden Age Hollywood movie slathered in blood, Pearl is the horror movie that everyone’s talking about… including Martin Scorsese. Total Film sits down with director Ti West and his co-creator/star Mia Goth to discuss how The Wizard Of Oz and Mary Poppins lead to psychosis and murder… WORDS JAMIE GRAHAM 68 | TOTAL FILM | FEBRUARY 2023

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hen Pearl bowed at last year’s Venice Film Festival, the reviews were ecstatic. “Terrifically accomplished and horribly gripping,” exclaimed The Guardian in its five-star review. “A handsome and sad horror drama, with scenes and shots and performances that will make you wonder if you’re supposed to laugh, cry or shriek,” gasped The Wrap. “An engrossing study in strangeness… emotional… [a] riveting portrait of insanity,” cried Screen Daily. And Total Film? “Clever, violent and wicked… real cinematic flourishes… fabulously unhinged,” was the breathless opinion of your most trusted magazine. But best of all was the review of a certain Martin Scorsese, who was so shaken and stirred by this modest horror movie made in New Zealand during the pandemic, he felt the need to take pause from being The World’s Greatest Living Director to moonlight as a critic. “Pearl makes for a wild, mesmerising, deeply – and I mean deeply – disturbing 102 minutes,” he wrote in a review sent to production company A24. “West and his muse and creative partner Mia Goth really know how to toy with their audience… before they plunge the knife into our chests and start twisting. I was enthralled, then disturbed, then so unsettled that I had trouble getting to sleep. But I couldn’t stop watching.” Four months later, over Zoom, writer-director Ti West and his star and co-writer Goth are still trying to get their heads around it. “It means absolutely as much as you would think it would,” says West with an air of gratitude and reverence. “It’s a real sort of humbling experience to have worked so hard on something, and to see it land for people. And the Scorsese thing is… You know, the difference, for me, between him saying that and my mom saying it is that Martin Scorsese has seen just about every movie that’s ever been made. So if he says it’s good…” West takes stock. “I’m a somewhat self-deprecating, hard-to-take-a-compliment kinda person, but you can’t help but be like, ‘Well, if he likes this one, maybe you should take it and have a nice day.’” Goth smiles sheepishly. “It was wonderful and surreal in the best of ways. A really special time. I’d never received that sort of reception for a project that I’d done. And it was for a movie I was part of from its very conception, from the ground up.” Daydream believer Set in 1918 as the Spanish flu swirls, Pearl is the story of the eponymous young woman (Goth) living on a farm in rural Texas with her infirm father (Matthew Sunderland) and repressive, hectoring mother (Tandi Wright). Her husband is off fighting in World War 1, leaving Pearl feeling stranded and alone, though her weekly trips into town, to the picture palace, offer a burst of welcome escape… more so when she starts cosying up to the handsome projectionist (David Corenswet). Could this man, with his promised connections, help pave With love interest the Projectionist (David Corenswet). Director Ti West and Goth on set. 70 | TOTAL FILM | FEBRUARY 2023 TALFILM.COM/SUBS

a path to a new life of wild excitement? Certainly all seems to be falling into place when Pearl hears of an upcoming open-call audition to join a travelling dance troupe… Of course, anyone who’s seen Ti West’s previous movie, X, will know that things are not going to work out. Somehow, somewhere, Pearl’s dreams must darken into nightmares, for in X, set in 1979, the same character is (SPOILER!) a murderous octogenarian who takes violent exception to some young filmmakers shooting a porno on her farm. In that movie, Goth, under heavy make-up, played Pearl, and also essayed Maxine, one of the wannabe starlets shooting the movie-within-a-movie. Pearl is a prequel, designed to explore just what it was that so fractured Pearl’s psyche and turned her into a killer. X was a breakout hit, but Pearl is no quick cash-in. It was conceived and written before a single frame of X was shot, and both movies were filmed back to back. “We were spending quite a bit of money in New Zealand to build a little corner of Texas, and I just thought, ‘Well, if there’s another movie we could make, and you cannibalise all of those expenses and things we built, then that’s a second movie, perhaps, right at the time when no one in the world can make a movie. And then I was like, ‘Well, a sequel isn’t that interesting, because more people going to that farm and dying isn’t much of a movie.’ But I had been spending a lot of time talking to Mia about the character of Pearl. We’d been talking about her backstory, because even though it’s not in X, I had to know it. So I was like, ‘I have this idea. If you subtracted 60 years to when she would be in her early 20s, it was coincidentally right around the time of the Spanish flu…’ It seemed to be a compelling parallel.” When West was in quarantine for two weeks in a New Zealand hotel, he reached out to Goth, who was then in New York. They FaceTimed each night. “We would chat for an hour, throwing out ideas,” recalls the London-born actress. “I would then get up early in the morning and write for an hour, stream-of-conscious style, and send those pages to him. And he would incorporate that into the script.” Fascinatingly, while X was very much a love letter to ’70s slasher movies, with a particular leaning towards The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Pearl operates as an ode to Golden Age Hollywood. Of all things, The Wizard Of Oz and Mary Poppins are high in the mix, as evidenced by the lurid colours, the use of fantasy to salve painful reality, and West’s clean compositions and cutting (like John Carpenter in the ’70s and ’80s, West has always brought a classical style to genre pictures – it’s there also in his earlier movies, The House Of The Devil and The Innkeepers). “You know, Pearl, as a character, her story when she was young is one of hope and naivety and aspirations and excitement and enthusiasm,” says West. “That, to me, just felt like the more traditional, For fork’s sake: Mia Goth as the titular Pearl. UNIVERSAL/A24 TOTALFILM.COM FEBRUARY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 71

almost Disney-like… or Golden Age of Hollywood-type theatrical presentation. I pushed myself to make a small horror movie but at a highly competent craft level. I definitely have a real reverence for the craft of filmmaking. I certainly approach movies visually, first and foremost. So, camera, direction and the aesthetics of the movie are very important to me. I do come to it from a classical approach. It just happens to be that the movies I make are, you know, kind of weird. It’s a strange thing to see someone beheaded in a Disney movie.” The Wizard Of Oz echoes are especially fascinating coming so soon after the documentary Lynch/Oz explored filmmaker David Lynch’s own enduring obsession with the 1939 Technicolor classic, with its themes and images rippling through Lynch’s entire body of work. The Wizard Of Oz is, after all, the archetypal American movie… “Yeah, absolutely,” says West. “I mean, it’s a great film, and as far as this Technicolor era of movies goes, and movies of someone on a farm wishing they were somewhere else, it’s probably the most perfect archetype that there will ever be for it.” Presumably, Goth, who’s been dubbed the Judy Garland of horror in press notices, was au fait with The Wizard Of Oz and Mary Poppins before shooting commenced? Or did West issue her with a checklist of MGM musicals and the like? “I watched those movies during the beginning of my prep just to get a sense of the world we’re in and what Ti wanted to create from a visual point of view,” she explains. “But those films are quite magical and surreal; they’re not very grounding. So I didn’t refer to those films when I was building my character and trying to ground her in truth. I was actually looking at movies like Lars von Trier’s Dancer In The Dark, with Björk. That, for me, was far more useful, because I think that film is more honest. I had to root it in truth.” Reality bites Ah, yes, because here’s the rub: while Pearl often looks and feels like a movie from Hollywood’s halcyon days, albeit with the aforementioned beheading, other bouts of strategic gore and our heroine shagging a scarecrow in a cornfield, at its centre is a performance rooted in credibility. To watch the film is to get a real sense of how a young woman in such an environment might undergo a psychotic break and start lashing out. “It’s everything, really,” says Goth. “I don’t know how you could play a character and think that the person you’re portraying is a bad person. You need to be able to empathise with the character.” It helped that Goth herself grew up a dreamer – dreams that actually came true when she was discovered, aged 14, by fashion photographer Gemma Booth, and ads for Vogue and Miu Miu led into a career in acting. Her first film role was in Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac: Vol. II, which in turn led to Gore Verbinski’s A Cure For Wellness, Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria and Claire Denis’ High Life. “ Oh yeah,” she beams. “I was in a constant state of escapism as a child. I would even flick through Ikea magazines and envision living in different homes and what it would be like to have a car. It was me and my mum, and I grew up in a single…” She pauses, not wanting to get too personal. “Ikea magazines, watching movies, reading books… I was always trying to plan out my escape exit of the situation I was in.” West chips in. “I didn’t want to make a movie where Pearl was a villain, and neither did Mia. The success of the movie kind of depended on that. When Pearl got to the audition, which is an hour or so into the movie, you’re rooting for her. Now, she’s done all kinds of fucked-up things prior to that audition [laughs], but if you’re still rooting for her, then the movie is non-judgemental. And that’s the way that we always treated it. We just treated her as Pearl. We just showed you Pearl waits to audition for the travelling dance troupe. What could possibly go wrong? 72 | TOTAL FILM | FEBRUARY 2023 TALFILM.COM/SUBS MAKING OF

what she was doing, and what she was going through. So that became a very honest portrayal of her. It would be easy to paint her as a villain or a psycho or something like that, but that didn’t seem very interesting.” To live and die in LA Taken separately or together, X and Pearl are among the finest horror titles of the last couple of years, adding to a body of work that suggests that West should be mentioned in the same breath as Robert Eggers, Ari Aster and Jordan Peele when people are discussing the most exciting US genre filmmakers at work right now. But it doesn’t end there: a third film, MaXXXine, will round out the trilogy, this one a sequel set in the 1980s and following the other character that Goth played in X, Maxine. In this third instalment, Maxine will be continuing her pursuit of fame by attempting to make it as an actress in LA. West announced MaXXXine back in March 2022, as X played the South By Southwest Film Festival, then opened a few days later across the US – a good five months before Pearl bowed in Venice. Beyond the description offered above, little is known about MaXXXine, though it’s thought to continue the previous movies’ conversations with the art of filmmaking and how we consume media, and it will explore the development of home-video releases – a format that especially benefitted the horror genre, ushering in a boom of low-budget exploitation flicks. “I’m going to stay pretty tight-lipped about that, because we kept Pearl a complete secret for the entire time that we made it until the premiere of X,” says West. “I think with so much stuff now, you know everything about [the film] before it comes out. What’s been fun about these movies has been how little people know. So I’m going to try, as best I can, to hold on to as much mystery as possible.” “We’re in the middle of the prep,” says Goth. “I’m enjoying it a lot. It’s the best script out of the three. It’s such a fun film, such a wild ride. I think fans of the previous two movies are going to love the little nuggets that are scattered through the script that reference the previous movies. But also people who haven’t seen Pearl and X will be able to enjoy MaXXXine as well. It’s a wild ride, and Maxine is so much fun to play.” As the three Conjuring films and its five spin-off movies demonstrate, it’s not only Marvel and DC that are creating universes. “I’m trying to build a world out of all this, like people do these days,” says West, while also acknowledging his trilogy reverberates all the way back to the raft of ’80s horror hits that MaXXXine will surely draw on. “You can’t make a slasher movie without a bunch of sequels,” he grins. And while he will not be drawn on any other details, he does nod when asked if MaXXXine will mirror ’80s stylistic tropes, just as X did with the ’70s and Pearl did with Hollywood’s Golden Age. “That is safe to say,” he concedes, and then his eyes torch with glee. “It will be as different from X as Pearl is from X, but it will be nothing like Pearl.” Now that’s X-citing. PEARL OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 17 MARCH. In one X-traordinary scene that was the talk of Venice, the camera holds on Pearl’s rictus grin for what seems like forever. Mia Goth explains how it happened… “That actually wasn’t written in the script, It was something that Ti thought of on the day before we shot it. He came up to me and said, ‘Listen, I have this idea, rather than freezeframe we’ll just keep going and see what happens. And if nothing comes of it, fine, we’ll just stick with the freezeframe.’ “I was like, ‘Oh, OK’. I really didn’t think it through at all, because I’d say that my body always has better ideas than my head. If I start thinking things through too much, I’m going to get in the way of my intuition, and your instincts are always what’s going to lead you in the right direction. “So we started filming. I wasn’t thinking too much. I was just very present, and in the moment. And that’s what came of it. And that scene proved to be an incredibly cathartic experience for me. A really poignant experience. It’s like a purging. That’s why I think it’s important for actors to go away and fill the well up again – to have new life experiences. Every time something happens, you can pop that in the joy well, or the pain well, or the fear well, and then you have all of these treasures that you can take to set and explore while you’re working. Hopefully you can ground it in truth and honesty and be vulnerable and brave. And hopefully someone else will watch that and might not feel so alone.” JG ‘You can’t make a slasher movie without a bunch of sequels’ TI WEST Smile for the camera Tandi Wright plays Pearl’s mother, Ruth. “That croc-infested river sure looks purdy, don’t it, Daddy dear…” TOTALFILM.COM FEBRUARY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 73 PEARL

ALL GOOD HERE 74 | TOTAL FILM | FEBRUARY 2023 TF INVESTIGATES

hen rumours started circulating in early January that the production of Francis Ford Coppola’s long-in-gestation passion project Megalopolis was spiralling out of control, the veteran director wasted no time shutting them down. “I don’t know what anyone’s talking about,” he announced from his film’s Atlanta set. “I love my cast, I love what I’m getting each day, I am on schedule and on budget.” Star Adam Driver was just as quick to rubbish a report that claimed the Godfather auteur’s self-financed future opus had been beset by ballooning costs and crew exits. “All good here!” he stated bullishly. “Not sure what set you’re talking about! I’ve been on sets that were chaotic, and this one is far from it.” Given how long Megalopolis has taken to get in front of the cameras, you can’t blame Coppola for feeling a little defensive. (He began writing the screenplay for his tale of an architect tasked with rebuilding New York City in the 1980s, only to pull the plug in the wake of 2001’s September 11 attacks.) If there is anybody who can speak with authority about out-of-control film shoots, though, it is surely the 83-year-old. It was he, after all, who bankrupted his own studio by making One From The Heart, a 1982 folly whose lavish extravagances included a partial replica of Las Vegas’ McCarran Airport. And then, of course, there 1979’s Apocalypse Now, a hallucinogenic war saga so monumentally bedevilled it spawned its own tell-all documentary (1991’s Hearts Of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse). “We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money [and] equipment, and little by little we went insane,” the director (in)famously said of a shoot that lost its sets to a typhoon, its rented choppers to the Filipino army’s rebel-fighting activities and its leading man (almost) to a near-fatal heart attack. So ruinous did things get that Coppola had a list of replacement helmers prepared should he cark it – and that was before an overweight Marlon Brando rocked up to mumble his way through a gumbo of mostly improvised dialogue. “I read a review that said it was the biggest Hollywood disaster in 40 years,” Coppola told this magazine in 2008. “I was crushed. ‘Gosh,’ I said. ‘Is there no film worse? Of all the movies made in the last 40 years, this is the worst one? That’s pretty terrible.’” Four decades on and several reduxes later, Apocalypse Now’s legendary status is now firmly set in stone. Other directorial indulgences of its era, though, remain irrevocably tainted by their troubled geneses. Michael Cimino, whose own Vietnam flick (1978’s The Deer Hunter) had its share Torched sets and death threats, typhoons and tragedies – the movie biz has seen them all. What lessons can be learned when film shoots go crazy? WORDS NEIL SMITH FEBRUARY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 75 TROUBLED SHOOTS

of tribulations on its way to the screen, torpedoed his reputation spectacularly with follow-up Heaven’s Gate, an 1890s-set western that went wildly over budget in the face of its creator’s obsessive perfectionism, penchant for multiple takes and insistence that sets be knocked down and reerected to meet his exacting aesthetic standards. William Friedkin, meanwhile, lost most of the goodwill he had garnered from The French Connection and The Exorcist by squandering $22m on 1977’s Sorcerer, a remake of Clouzot’s The Wages Of Fear that racked up immense costs during a tempestuous shoot in the Dominican Republic. (A suspension bridge needed for one set-piece scene cost $1m to raise and another $1m to be shipped to and rebuilt in Mexico after the river beneath it dried up.) These days, a studio behemoth like Warner Bros. can take an unfavoured blockbuster like Batgirl and write the whole thing off as a $90m tax loss. When Elizabeth Taylor’s pneumonia forced Cleopatra (1963) to stop filming early in production, though, 20th Century Fox chose to carry on Cleo, recasting her co-stars, hiring a new director and shifting the shoot from England to Rome a few months later. Costs climbed accordingly to an eye-watering $44m, leaving Fox on the edge of collapse. And then there was Taylor’s romance with Richard Burton to consider, a combustible relationship that necessitated an alternative filming schedule to be devised for days when they were at loggerheads. (A two-week delay resulted from Taylor arriving one morning with a black eye and a cut nose, while another day was lost thanks to the swollen eyes she had been left with after an all-night weep.) THAT SINKING FEELING Cleopatra actually did OK at the box office and went on to win four Oscars. Heaven’s Gate and Sorcerer are now regarded, by some, as masterpieces. Most of the time, though, a calamitous production tends to be a harbinger for how the film will ultimately be received. Take Raise The Titanic, which spent $350k on a 55-foot-long replica of the vessel only to find it was too big to fit in the studio’s tank. (Another $6m was spent on a larger tank, helping to swell overall costs to $40m; its producer Lew Grade would later observe that “it would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic”.) Or Hugh Hudson’s Revolution, a $28m debacle whose fate appeared to be sealed the day a camera crane worth $250k fell off a cliff; the critically savaged result helped to sink Goldcrest Films and left Al Pacino so jaded he took a four-year break from moviemaking. And then there are films that seem to defy their directors’ every attempt to make them – a phenomenon exemplified by Terry Gilliam’s decades-long quest to bring The Man Who Killed Don Quixote to the screen. The Monty Python man started to work on the film in 1989, not long after finishing the box-office bomb that was The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen. It took nine years to raise the money, though, and two years more before filming could eventually commence in Spain. Thanks to 2002 documentary Lost In La Mancha we know what happened next. Two days into production a flash flood decimated the set; not long after, it became evident that Jean Rochefort was too ill to continue as Johnny Depp’s co-star. Financial issues led to the picture’s cancellation and a 15-year battle to revive it; when Gilliam finally managed to do so, with Jonathan Pryce as Quixote and the aforementioned Driver in Depp’s old role, a protracted legal dispute with one of his former producers stymied his efforts to release it. “So many reasonable, decent people told me I should give it up,” the director admitted in 2020. “But no crazy person said, ‘Give it AL AMY, GET T Y up’; they all said, ‘You gotta do it.’ I listened to the crazy people.” If we are talking crazy we should probably mention Werner Herzog, a titanic Teuton whose outlandish career has taken on the form of an extended preposterous anecdote. Wacky incidents on his sets include him voluntarily leaping into a cactus patch (Even Dwarfs Started Small, 1970), threatening to kill actor Klaus Kinski if he quit the film (1972’s Aguirre, The Wrath Of God) and having a 320-ton steamship dragged over a hill in Peru (1982’s Fitzcarraldo). The latter work is a veritable treasure trove of mishap, a border war forcing the production to relocate and a pair of plane crashes leaving five people with critical injuries. Raids on the set by indigenous tribespeople left one man with an arrow in his throat, while DoP Thomas Mauch had to withstand surgery without anaesthetic after hurting his hand. “I shouldn’t make movies any more,” said Herzog near the end of filming. “I should go to a lunatic asylum right away.” The real disaster, though, is when making a film costs someone their life. In 1982, Vic Morrow and two Vietnamese child actors – seven-year-old Myca Dinh Le and six-year-old Renee Shin-Yi Chen – died while shooting the John Landis section of Twilight Zone: The Movie when a pyrotechnic explosion caused a helicopter to fall on top of them. In 1993, Bruce Lee’s son Brandon was fatally wounded by a fragment of bullet lodged in a stunt pistol’s barrel that struck him in the abdomen when a blank cartridge was fired. And in 2021, cinematographer Halyna Hutchins died from being accidentally shot by Alec Baldwin with what he had thought was a prop gun on the New Mexico set of Rust. (A settlement was reached last year, and Hutchins’ husband described the incident as “a terrible accident”.) “No movie is worth dying for,” said Steven Spielberg, who curtailed his friendship with Landis after the Twilight Zone tragedy. “If something isn’t safe, it’s the right and responsibility of every actor or crew member to yell ‘cut’.” So what can we learn when shoots go off the rails and bad luck, or cruel fate, appears to have it in for them? Maybe that it can take just as much effort to make a bad movie as it takes to make a good one; that Mother Nature will always have the last word; and that the last people you want to see on a set are an undertaker and a coroner. There’s a common conception about art, however, that one has to suffer to create it, and that the ends, however hard-won, will always justify the means. “It’s so pervasive, this idea that genius can’t come without trouble,” said Sarah Polley who, years after appearing in Baron Munchausen, would remember its shoot as being “physically gruelling and unsafe”. “It has paved the way for countless abuses.” The counterpoint to that, of course, is the famous speech that Orson Welles, no stranger to arduous productions, delivers in 1949 film noir The Third Man. “In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed – but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance,” he tells Joseph Cotten. “In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock...” MEGALOPOLIS IS EXPECTED TO OPEN IN CINEMAS IN 2024. ‘SO MANY REASONABLE, DECENT PEOPLE TOLD ME I SHOULD GIVE UP. BUT NO CRAZY PERSON SAID, “GIVE IT UP.” I LISTENED TO THE CRAZY PEOPLE’ TERRY GILLIAM 76 | TOTAL FILM | FEBRUARY 2023 TALFILM.COM/SUBS TF INVESTIGATES

ApocalypseNowsawthecrew goontheirownjourneyupriver intotheheartofdarkness TaylorandBurton’srollercoaster relationshipaddedbumpstothe filmingofepicCleopatra FilmingFitzcarraldoin PerupushedWerner Herzogtothelimits KrisKristoffersonandMichael Ciminoonthesetoftheir westernflopHeaven’sGate DirectorTerryGilliam’s DonQuixoteprojectfinally madeittoscreenin  starringJonathanPryce TOTALFILM.COM FEBRUARY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 77 TROUBLED SHOOTS

Having made his mark as one of the biggest comedic names of the 21st century, Seth Rogen’s now starring in Steven Spielberg’s prestige picture The Fabelmans, alongside a prolific slate that encompasses writing, producing and a side hustle true to his on-screen stoner persona. He also has plenty to say to those who claim that comedy, as we know it, is under threat… “I HAVE NEVER THOUGHT, ‘I WISH I COULD MAKE THAT JOKE, BUT CANCEL CULTURE WILL COME AND GET ME.’” INTERVIEW MATT MAYTUM JOE PUGLIESE / AUGUST PORTRAITS JOE PUGLIESE 78 | TOTAL FILM | FEBRUARY 2023 TALFILM.COM/SUBS

hen Total Film catches up with Seth Rogen in December 2022, he’s peering into Zoom from his standing desk, leaning in and out of the digital frame with a restless energy. If he’s acting like he has somewhere else to be, he probably does. Forget the slackers he became famous playing; Rogen is one of the busiest people in Hollywood. He’s been an in-demand comedic leading man since Knocked Up in 2007, but he also writes and produces, having established production company Point Grey Pictures with longtime creative partner Evan Goldberg, which creates movies as well as such TV shows as Preacher, The Boys and Pam & Tommy. Rogen and Goldberg also co-founded cannabis company Houseplant; Rogen describes the business as “gratifying in a zd|#wkdwġv#wrwdoo|#glļhuhqw#iurp#prylhvĤ1 Wkh#ohdslqj0rļ#srlqw#iru#rxu#wdon# today is The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical awards favourite, which has, at the time of writing, already won big at the Golden Globes. Rogen plays ‘Uncle’ Bennie, a family friend of Burt and Mitzi Fabelman (Paul Dano and Michelle Williams), whose son, Gabriel, is an aspiring director. Spielberg’s parents’ divorce famously cast a long shadow, and it’s the connection between Mitzi and Bennie that will ultimately cause a rift in the Fabelman family. But Bennie’s no villain. Far from it. “When you talk to Steven and a lot of people who knew the actual guy that Bennie is based on, they would really light xs/Ĥ#h{sodlqv#Urjhq1#ģWkh|#zhuh#yhu|# fond of him. What happens with Bennie and Mitzi is devastating in some ways to the family. I put a lot of thought into how to make a character so that when that glg#kdsshq/#|rx#zhuh#qrw#vdg#iru#khu1Ĥ The Fabelmans is far from Rogen’s Ľuvw#gudpdwlf#uroh=#vhh#dovr#Vdudk#Srooh|ġv# Take This Waltz and Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs. For Rogen, drama is an easier gig than comedy. “A comedy also has to do doo#wkh#vwxļ#wkdw#d#prylh#olnh#wklv#lv# grlqj/#lq#d#orw#ri#zd|v/Ĥ#kh#vd|v/#guhvvhg# casually in a short-sleeved sweater and sporting his trademark thick-rimmed glasses and prodigious beard. “To me, comedy is honestly this, plus an hqwluh#rwkhu#ohyho#ri#h{shfwdwlrq#wkdw# zloo#remhfwlyho|#eh#sxw#wr#wkh#whvw1Ĥ Rogen’s been making ’em laugh since starting his stand-up career aged 12. Early on, his career was supercharged by Judd Apatow collaborations (Freaks And Geeks, Superbad, Bad Neighbours), and he also worked with James Franco across 10 features, although their partnership has ceased following misconduct allegations levelled against Franco. Rogen’s also done a line in funny and heartfelt, in smart comedies like 50/50 and Long Shot. Some of his most recent successes have been in producing, such as superhero subverting mega-hit The Boys, part of Point Grey’s bustling slate. “We really did not set out to become a elj#surgxfwlrq#frpsdq|/Ĥ#kh#vplohv1# “I think we locked three movies this week. We at times have had four TV shows on the air simultaneously. It’s far beyond what I thought we were going to do with the company, but lwġv#juhdw#wkdw#zhġuh#grlqj#lw$Ĥ Early on in your career, did you ever imagine you’d be starring in a Steven Spielberg prestige picture? Uh… no [laughs]. You know, I will say that I grew up watching a lot of those movies. I think there were smaller roles that would chime with me, every now and then, that would give a guy like me hope. I believe actually if you watch more of those older movies that I grew up with, these kind of prestige movies, comedians were kind of more [prevalent]… It used to be done a little bit more than it’s done now. But yeah, honestly, on a personal level, I never imagined that Steven would have any interest in working with me [laughs]. How did he pitch The Fabelmans to you? He said he had written a movie kind of based on his childhood, and how he ihoo#lq#oryh#zlwk#Ľoppdnlqj/#dqg#wkdw# zdv#nlqg#ri#h{sorulqj#wkh#frpsolfdwhg# dynamic of his family. And he was very nervous about it. That was something kh#h{suhvvhg#wr#ph#^laughs]. In my opinion, it was kind of funny – he was questioning whether or not his story was one that would be interesting to people. I found that to be funny, considering how many movies I’ve made based on the lives of much less remarkable people than him! And then he told me to read the script, and I did, and it was great. And I talked to klp#pd|eh#wkh#qh{w#gd|1#Qr#rqh#hovh#zdv# cast at that point. But he said that he would like me to be the Uncle Bennie character, dqg#wkdw#kh#zrxog#ohw#ph#nqrz#dv#kh#Ľoohg# out the rest of the cast, basically [laughs]. Were there any moments on set where you thought, ‘OK, this is why Steven is clearly one of the best to ever do it’? Yeah, all the time. And it was interesting, because I assumed it would be like being on the court, watching Michael Jordan play basketball, in that it’s educational to a degree. But also a lot of what you’re vhhlqj#lv#olnh/#ģRk/#qr#rqh#fdq#gr#wklv1Ĥ You can’t teach it, and you can’t absorb it. It’s a level of instinctual mastery that is kind of astounding to watch. And I really Breaking out in hit romcom Knocked Up in 2007. 80 | TOTAL FILM | FEBRUARY 2023 TALFILM.COM/SUBS INTERVIEW

tried to learn a lot. And I stood as close to him as possible, and asked as many questions as it seemed like he was willing to tolerate. But I actually think blocking [the staging of the actors in relation to the camera] is one of the hardest things. When I watch movies that feel awkward or have sequences that are strange and don’t seem to be landing in the way that they should, I often identify blocking as the culprit. And he’s incredible at it. He can just do it [in the moment]. It’d be like writing a completed script in real time. It’s not something most people can do [laughs]. Wklv#lv#|rxu#vhfrqg#Ľop# with Michelle Williams. How did this experience compare to Take This Waltz? That was quite a long time ago. I think we’re both much more comfortable in a lot of ways. As soon as I heard it was Michelle [playing Mitzi], I was like, “Oh, this is jrlqj#wr#eh#Ľqh1Ĥ#Lwġv#olnh#ehlqj#wrog#|rx# have to push a boulder up a hill, and then, ģDqg#|rxġuh#grlqj#lw#zlwk#Wkh#Urfn1Ĥ You’re like, “Oh, this will make it hdvlhu2kh#zloo#gr#prvw#ri#lw1Ĥ I just knew that she’s so good, it makes it hard to be in a bad scene with her in some ways. Honestly, it made me much more comfortable. Krz#glļhuhqw#gr#|rx#Ľqg#gudpdwlf# roles compared to comedy? L#wklqn#lwġv#d#glļhuhqw#dqvzhu/#zkr#|rx# ask. For me, personally, comedy is much harder. I think it’s much, much harder. Honestly, the more comedy I do, and the more dramatic movies I do, the more I think that. Because comedy has an objective barometer to it. Either they laugh or they don’t. And a movie like this does not have that. It’s far more subjective. When I’m making a comedy, that pressure of being objectively funny is constant and permeates into every second of the day for me. You started out doing stand-up at a very young age. Was that terrifying? It was terrifying but the scope of these things is not lost on me. It is objectively easier to bomb in front of 100 people than 30 million people, you know? And it’s easier to bomb when the total investment given to you is time and a microphone, rather than, you know, tens of millions of dollars, and the infrastructure of an hqwluh#prylh#vwxglr#h{shfwlqj#d#surĽw# from what they’ve done for you, and literally every mainstream media outlet publishing a written review of your work for everyone to see. Stand-up was scary. Uhohdvlqj#d#frphg|#Ľop#kdv#pxfk#pruh# pressure and is much scarier [laughs]. Mxgg#Dsdwrz#kdv#ehhq#d#slyrwdo#Ľjxuh#lq# your career. How has that relationship developed over the years? I mean, at this point, I’d say we’re just friends. We don’t really work together any more. We don’t currently have plans to work together. We had lunch a month ago. I still see him regularly. I run into klp1#Zh#wh{w#dqg#hpdlo#hdfk#rwkhu1#L#zrxog# almost say it’s familial. I’ve known him since I was 16 years old, and I’m 40 now. We have an incredibly long history together. And, yeah, I’d say it’s gotten to a very good [place] – and I think whenever you work for someone for that long, it gets complicated at times. You know what I mean? But right now, I would say we are friends [laughs]. ‘RELEASING A COMEDY FILM IS MUCH SCARIER THAN STAND-UP’ EONE, ALAMY As ‘Uncle’ Bennie (alongside Paul Dano and Michelle Williams) in The Fabelmans. TOTALFILM.COM FEBRUARY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 81

Knocked Up#nlfnvwduwhg#|rxu#Ľop# career. Was it daunting to lead a movie back then? It was daunting but I felt ready. I look back and I think one of my greatest assets when I was younger was that I was an incredibly hard worker and also frqĽghqw1#L#wkrxjkw#zkdw#zh#zhuh#grlqj# was funny, and I thought it was additive to comedy. I thought we had ideas that no one else was really doing. And I had felt that way for years before we were given the opportunity to make Knocked Up and Superbad and all those movies that we kind of came out the gate with. So by the time they were letting us do it, I was like, “Yes, we should be doing this. If anything, you’ve let other people who are qrw#ixqq|/#gr#wrr#pxfk#ri#wklv1Ĥ#^laughs] You said you have no plans to work with Judd in the immediate future. Does that mean there’s no hope of a Freaks And Geeks revival of any kind? I don’t know. I don’t think so. And I would work with Judd on something. It’s not like a rule we’ve made for ourselves by any means. But, no. I think that in general… I don’t know how that would work [laughs]. When you’ve made something that everyone likes… We – and a lot of people I work with – come from the perspective ri#olnh=#xqohvv#|rx#uhdoo|#nqrz#|rx#fdq#dgg# to it, you should probably just leave it alone. You mentioned being a hard worker. You seem to have been insanely busy – not just as an actor, but also as a writer and as a producer – since you started. Would you say that you have workaholic tendencies? Um… probably. I think that would imply that it’s coming at a cost to the rest of my life, which I don’t think it is, honestly. I have a great relationship with my wife. I think especially lately I’ve stopped working outside of Los Angeles a lot, which has been very helpful to having what I would say is a more full life in regards to not just working all the time. But I like working. And if I’m working on things I like, which I suhww|#pxfk#h{foxvlyho|#gr#qrz/#lwġv# really fun and gratifying, and I work with people I like. I get a full night’s sleep. I think I’m very good at time management and compartmentalising and focusing on one thing intensely for an amount of time that is necessary, dqg#wkhq#vkliwlqj#wr#wkh#qh{w#wklqj1# I think it’s just something I’ve done for a really long time, since I was a kid. When I was 18, I was a writer and an actor on a TV show. So I would have to go KNOCKED UP 2007 Following earlier Judd Apatow collabs, Rogen starred in the hit accidental-pregnancy com; the same year, Apatow produced Rogen’s Superbad script. “I was suddenly much higher up the food chain,” the actor recalls. PINEAPPLE EXPRESS 2008 The stoner-com further showcased Rogen’s humour, and its ability to straddle genres. “Judd Apatow came up with the initial idea of a weed action movie, then me and Evan tried to figure out what that would be,” he says. THIS IS THE END 2013 Rogen and Goldberg’s directorial debut was an apocalyptic disaster comedy that featured a host of as-themselves cameos. “It was weird playing Seth Rogen, but it was very freeing in some ways,” he muses. STEVE JOBS 2015 Having already demonstrated his dramatic chops in Take This Waltz and 50/50, Rogen starred as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in Danny Boyle’s bold take on the tech icon. “We became pretty close,” says Rogen of Woz. SAUSAGE PARTY 2016 Rogen’s baritone has graced a vast array of animated films, but none exemplify his raucous and irreverent sensibilities like this euphemistic tale of supermarket staples. The climactic orgy defies comprehension. MM ALAMY FIVE STAR TURNS 82 | TOTAL FILM | FEBRUARY 2023 INTERVIEW

from the writers’ room to set, rewriting someone else’s script, back to set, acting in a scene, to a casting session, to this… Did you see writing and producing as a way of having control over your career? I think I came up in an environment where control was always instilled in me as an important thing, and the more control over a project the creative entities have, the better it will probably be. It was what Judd always vkrzhg#ph/#dqg#zrxog#Ľjkw#kdug#iru1 As we started making movies, we zrxog#kdyh#h{shulhqfhv#zkhuh#lw#zrxog#eh# frustrating. We were like, “You spend all this time working on a movie, and then when they go to market it, you’re not part ri#wkdw#frqyhuvdwlrq1#\rxu#mre#lv#grqh1Ĥ L#uhphpehu#wklqnlqj=#rxu#mre#vkrxogqġw# be done. Why can we conceive of it, and make it, and when it comes to the time to present it to the world, we’re not a part of those conversations? So honestly, our desire to be producers largely came, initially, just out of a strong desire to be a part of the marketing of the release. And then as we started to get better at producing things, other people started eulqjlqj#xv#vwxļ#dqg#zh# vwduwhg#Ľqglqj#surmhfwv# that we weren’t writing or directing or starring in, but people wanted to make. And we started to create a really strong team of people at Point Grey that people were really h{flwhg#wr#zrun#zlwk#Ğ#dqg#lw#uhdoo|#juhz1# I look back and it’s very organic. People often talk about quote-unquote “cancel culture” impacting comedy. Have you ever felt any of that, in terms of the kind of material that gets commissioned and audiences want? I personally haven’t. I truly have never, for one second, thought, ‘Man, I wish I could make that joke, but if I did, cancel culture would come and get me.’ That thought has never even remotely entered my head. And if anything, the people I at times have ehhq#zruulhg#derxw#rļhqglqj/#duh#wkh#h{dfw# people who are complaining about cancel fxowxuh1#L#Ľqg#wkdw#wkh|ġuh#yhu|#vhqvlwlyh1 But I don’t get it. I marvel at it. And I was having dinner with [actor/comedian`#Qlfn# Kroll last night, and I was like, “What is it that everyone else is complaining about? What are they so mad about? What is the joke they wish they could make that cancel culture would come get them [for] if they pdnh#lwB#Whoo#ph#wkh#mrnh$#Zkdwġv#wkh#mrnhBĤ I truly don’t understand it. People say anything, and do anything. Louis CK is still doing stand-up comedy. Who has been cancelled? To me, it’s like it’s a comedic persona that I think some comedians, who don’t have a better comedic shuvrqd/#kdyh#dgrswhg1#Zklfk#lv=#ģL#dp# the guy who’s willing to say anything dqg#lvqġw#diudlg#ri#fdqfho#fxowxuh1Ĥ And what that is? I truly could not tell you. That being said, there are certain instances where, yes, someone was hired on SNL, and they found old tweets, and they were not hired on SNL. I think vwxļ#olnh#wkdw#lv#krqhvwo|#vloo|#d#orw#ri# the time. And I do think it’s dumb when vrphrqh#orvhv#d#vshflĽf#mre1#Lv#wkdw# shuvrq#fdqfhoohgB#Qr$#Wkh|#orvw#d#mre$# Lġyh#orvw#mrev1#Lġyh#ehhq#Ľuhg#iru#zulwlqj# things that the people [that I was writing for] didn’t like. Was I cancelled, or did I mxvw#jhw#Ľuhg#ehfdxvh#wkh#shuvrq#L#zdv# writing for didn’t like my sensibilities? I think if you break the law, then yes, maybe you should not, you know, be allowed to do the same things that someone who has not broken the law is allowed to do. But is there anyone, truly, who has said a joke and then their career was destroyed over it? I’m genuinely curious. Is there dq|#vshflĽf#h{dpsoh#wkdw# you are referencing as you ask me this question? It feels like a very nebulous term that just gets brought up. Todd Phillips said it was harder to get comedies made these days because of “woke culture”. And he went on to make the movie [Joker] where the star and hero murders a man on television, and it made a billion dollars. Wkdwġv#zkdw#L#dovr#wklqn#lv#fud}|=#frphg|#lv# too woke, but you can then make a movie about a guy murdering someone on TV [laughs], and everyone’s just OK with it. And I’m not saying he shouldn’t. Lġp#mxvw#vd|lqj=#wkrvh#wzr#lghdv#gr#qrw# function with one another. And if he’s mad that The Hangover#kdv#kruulĽfdoo|# homophobic language in it, and he zlvkhv#wkdw#kh#frxog#vwloo#vd|#wkdw#vwxļ/# and he thinks saying those things is wkh#glļhuhqfh#ehwzhhq#pdnlqj#d#jrrg# comedy and a bad comedy – then I guess I just don’t agree with that [laughs]. And if you tell me, “You know what, it’s uhdoo|#rļhqvlyh#li#|rx#vd|#wkhvh#wkuhh#ru# irxu#wklqjvĤ#Ğ#wr#ph/#Lġp#olnh/#ģRN/#L#fdq# easily make a very funny comedy movie zlwkrxw#vd|lqj#wkrvh#wklqjv1Ĥ#Wkh|ġuh#qrw# things I want to say anyway, you know? ‘CONTROL WAS ALWAYS INSTILLED IN ME AS IMPORTANT’ SETH ROGEN IN NUMBERS The age Rogen co-wrote the first draft of Superbad. Emmy award nominations. Acting credits to his name. 106 9.3M $1.6BN THE BOX-OFFICE TAKE OF ROGEN’S HIGHESTGROSSING FILM, THE LION KING (2019). FOLLOWERS ON TWITTER. TOTALFILM.COM FEBRUARY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 83 SETH ROGEN

TALFILM.COM/SUBS The Boys and Preacher have been a big part of your producing career… The Boys#lv#wkh#shuihfw#h{dpsoh#^of a comedy that pushes boundaries but isn’t ‘cancelled’]! I truly don’t get it. We can make The Boys. So where’s the problem? What do you make of the current superhero landscape that dominates cinemas? The Boys and Preacher are interesting outliers, in that they are aimed at adults. Ph#dqg#Hydq/#rqh#ri#wkh#Ľuvw#wklqjv#zh# ever bonded over was a love of comic books. I still have all the comic books I grew up with somewhere. I would go to the comic-book store every week. So as someone who just loves these stories, and always fantasised about seeing them brought to life, I think it’s cool. And I olnh#d#orw#ri#wkh#Ľopv1#L#wklqn#wkdw#Nhylq# Feige is a brilliant guy, and I think a lot ri#wkh#Ľoppdnhuv#khġv#kluhg#wr#pdnh# wkhvh#prylhv#duh#juhdw#Ľoppdnhuv1 But as someone who doesn’t have children… It is [all] kind of geared towards kids, you know? There are times where I will forget. I’ll watch one of these things, as an adult with no kids, and be like, ģRk/#wklv#lv#mxvw#qrw#iru#ph1Ĥ#^laughs] And as me and Evan got older, we never stopped reading comic books. L#uhphpehu#zkhq#wkh#Ľuvw#lvvxh#ri#The Boys came out. We were big fans of [writer/ creator] Garth Ennis, because we’d read Preacher already, and we bought it. Zh#kdg#wkh#vdph#h{shulhqfh#wkdw# I think, now, audiences are having, zklfk#lv=#ģRk/#zhġyh#ehhq#uhdglqj#Pduyho# for the last 15 years and now there’s vwduwlqj#wr#eh#vwxļ#olnh#wklv/#zklfk#lv# a great addition to this landscape. D#qhz#shuvshfwlyh#rq#wklv#odqgvfdsh1Ĥ It’s [the same genre] but not considering younger audiences in the slightest. If anything, it’s much more geared towards adult audiences. And I think just as naturally to us as The Boys fell into the comic-book-store landscape as a comic, we thought it would fall well into the media landscape as a TV show. But truthfully, without Marvel, The Boys zrxogqġw#h{lvw#ru#eh#lqwhuhvwlqj1#Lġp#dzduh# of that. I think if it was only Marvel, it would be bad. But I think it isn’t – clearly. Dq#h{dpsoh#Lġp#dozd|v#txrwlqj#lv/# there’s a point in history where a bunch ri#Ľoppdnhuv#zrxog#kdyh#ehhq#vlwwlqj# around, being like, “Do you think we’ll ever make a movie that’s not a western again? Everything’s a western! Westerns dominate the fucking movies. If it doesn’t have a hat and a gun and a carriage, people duhqġw#jrlqj#wr#jr#vhh#lw#dq|#pruh1Ĥ

JOE PUGLIESE / AUGUST, ALAMY ‘TO ME, LONGEVITY IS A GOAL IN AND OF ITSELF’ With former long-time collaborator James Franco in 2014’s The Interview. TOTALFILM.COM FEBRUARY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 85 SETH ROGEN And now that sounds ludicrous. Qrwklqj#odvwv#iruhyhu/#vr#hyhqwxdoo|# the trend will change. But for now, Lġp#wrwdoo|#kdss|#zlwk#wkdw#vshflĽf# element of it. It has made it harder for frphg|#Ľopv/#hvshfldoo|#lq#wkhdwuhv/# because those movies are also pretty funny and a lot of them almost fall into some sort of comedy genre. That’s what I’ve found to be hard. Qrz#zkhq#zhġuh#jrlqj#rxw#wkhdwulfdoo|# with a $20m comedy, we’re competing with a $200m comedy that really has a lot of the same actors that we would probably be wanting to put in our $20m R-rated comedy, you know? They’ve got Randall [Park]. They’ve got Paul Rudd. You’ve done a lot of voicework for dqlpdwhg#Ľopv1#Lv#wkdw#d#sdvvlrq# or have people just gravitated to your distinctive voice? I do really enjoy it. I’d say it’s a combination of the two. There’s a certain novelty to seeing an animated character that you voiced come to life. And I genuinely like these movies. I watch them. A lot of them are geared towards children, but not all of them. And with something like The Super Mario Bros. Movie, when you just grew up [with it`/#|rxġuh#mxvw#olnh/#ģ\hdk1Ĥ#Krz# do you not participate in that? It’s also fun. I like the performance element of it. I like being in a recording booth. I mostly just enjoy the process of it. Not many people have pdgh#d#Ľop#wkdwġv# been at the centre of an international incident like The Interview. How do |rx#uhľhfw#rq#wkdw#qrzB Wkdwġv#dqrwkhu#wklqj=#shrsoh#frpsodlq# about cancel culture. We’re some of the few people who actually made a thing that zdv#ylhzhg#dv#vr#rļhqvlyh#wr#wkh#shuvrq# it was targeting that they threatened a war over it, essentially. And as a result, the studio did not release the movie in the way they were supposed to, you know? Vr#wr#ph/#Lġp#olnh=#that’s controversy. Zh#h{shulhqfhg#dq#dfwxdo#frqwuryhuv|#zlwk# rxu#Ľop1#Lq#d#zd|/#lw#zdv#d#jrrg#uhvhwwlqj# of my barometer, because I have been with people since then where they feel as though they’re in some controversy, or they feel as though the movie is at the centre of some controversy. And I’m like, “This is gossip. This is a bad headline. This is an undesirable outwardfacing moment. This is not controversy. If the president isn’t being asked about it in his news conference, lwġv#qrw#wkdw#elj#d#ghdo1Ĥ And I also saw that even after that, we were Ľqh/#|rx#nqrzB#Dqg#li#|rx# deal with something like that smartly and intelligently, you can come out of it – with grace and with an xqghuvwdqglqj#ri#wkh#frqwh{w#ri#lw#doo1 Looking ahead, what sets Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem apart from previous versions? We’ve really dedicated ourselves to pdnlqj#d#juhdw#Ľop#wkdw#irfxvhv#rq#wkh# teenage element of the movie. We cast actual teenagers to be the teenagers. It’s incredibly naturalistic. I don’t know what I can say. It’s shaping up really well. I’m uhdoo|#h{flwhg#derxw#lw1#Lġyh#ehhq#zrunlqj# on it a lot, especially over the last few prqwkv/#dv#zh#Ľqdolvh#d#orw#ri#wkh#vwhsv# needed to get the animation done by the time the movie’s coming out. But the cast is amazing. It’s turning out really well. And I think early [2023], we’ll probably vwduw#vkrzlqj#hyhu|rqh#vrph#vwxļ1 Finally, having done so much, is there anything still left on the bucket list? Tons [laughs]. I would love to keep working. To me, longevity is a goal in and of itself. Being able to keep working, and being able to keep making things, and being able to add to the things that I’ve done, and being able to contribute to other people’s work. And being a small part of even other people’s work – if it’s great – is really gratifying. So, yeah, mostly I would just like to be able to keep working [laughs]. THE FABELMANS IS IN CINEMAS NOW. SETH ROGEN LINE READING “It’s not binary. You can be decent and gifted at the same time.” STEVE WOZNIAK, STEVE JOBS “I’M THE BEST THING THAT’S EVER HAPPENED TO YOU? NOW I’M STARTING TO FEEL A LITTLE SORRY FOR YOU...” BEN STONE KNOCKED UP “I’M A BUN-OGAMIST, AND WHEN A BUN THIS FRESH IS INTO YOU, ALL YOU ASK IS WHEN AND HOW DEEP.” FRANK SAUSAGE PARTY

EDITED BY MATTHEW LEYLAND @TOTALFILM_MATTL ★★★★★ EXTRAORDINARY TREASURE ★★★★★ BEDAZZLING ★★★★★ JOURNEY TO THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD ★★★★★ CAN DO NO RIGHT ★★★★★ THAT THIRD MUMMY FILM, BASICALLY THE WORLD’S MOST TRUSTED MOVIE

OUT NOW Alice, Darling ★★★ p95 The Lair ★★★ p94 M3GAN ★★★ p99 Nascondino ★★★★ p99 Oscar Peterson: Black + White ★★ p99 Plane ★★★ p97 Shadow Master ★★ p96 Shotgun Wedding ★★★ p96 That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime The Movie: Scarlet Bond ★★★ p94 3 FEBRUARY EO ★★★ p92 Husband ★★★ p94 I Get Knocked Down ★★ p97 Puss In Boots: The Last Wish ★★★★ p90 Saint Omer ★★★★ p91 She Is Love ★★ p94 The Whale ★★★★ p88 You Resemble Me ★★★ p96 10 FEBRUARY Blue Jean ★★★★ p97 Town Of Strangers ★★★★ p97 Women Talking ★★★★ p93 13 FEBRUARY Seriously Red ★★★ p99 17 FEBRUARY Atomic Hope ★★ p97 The Inspection ★★★★ p94 Marcel The Shell With Shoes On ★★★★ p92 Nostalgia ★★★★ p98 The Son ★★★ p91 20 FEBRUARY Next Exit ★★★★ p99 24 FEBRUARY Broker ★★★★ p96 Creature ★★★ p96 Joyland ★★★★ p98 What’s Love Got To Do With It? ★★★ p95 ALSO RELEASED We couldn’t see them in time for this issue, so head to gamesradar.com/totalfilm for reviews of the following: TITLE RELEASE DATE Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania 17 February Cocaine Bear 24 February Knock At The Cabin 3 February Magic Mike’s Last Dance 10 February Missing 24 February For more reviews visit gamesradar.com/totalfilm EXTRAS Archive/Blu-ray reviews p100 TV, Tech Special, Soundtracks, Games, Books p101-106 90 92 93 REVIEWS THE WHALE Fraser glory… 88 99 FEBRUARY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 87

★★★★★ OUT 3 FEBRUARY CINEMAS As the headlines attest, Brendan Fraser’s awardsbothering performance is the main event in The Whale, in which he plays a living-with-obesity recluse who’s seeking forgiveness from his estranged daughter – and himself. Darren Aronofsky’s button-pushing adaptation of Samuel D. Hunter’s hit play sees the star buried in a 600lb body-adjustment suit, with wispy hair, clammy skin and the sadness of a condemned animal in his eyes. Fraser’s Charlie is a man whose addictive emotional eating has brought him to the edge of death in his cramped Idaho apartment. Imprisoned by his own shame and lack of mobility, he spends his days teaching online students literature (with the camera switched off), wanking miserably over gay porn and over-apologising to everyone, from the missionary (Ty Simpkins) who arrives on his doorstep when he’s mid-collapse, to his chippy/caring nurse friend Liz (Hong Chau), estranged teen daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink) and ex-wife Mary (Samantha Morton). Charlie’s blood pressure has climbed to a critical 238/134 and, eschewing medical intervention apart from the comfort Liz offers, he knows that his days are numbered. “He won’t be here next week,” plain-speaking Liz tells visitors as Charlie’s vital organs start to fail. The body he’s created from pain, compulsion and as a literal buffer to society seems to be finally ushering him out of the cruel world he inhabits. But even as his physical existence fades, Charlie’s soul still burns bright. An unshakeable optimist, he puts his trust THE WHALE TBC Inside man… DIRECTOR Darren Aronofsky STARRING Brendan Fraser, Hong Chau, Sadie Sink, Ty Simpkins, Samantha Morton SCREENPLAY Samuel D. Hunter DISTRIBUTOR A24 RUNNING TIME 117 mins GODS AND MONSTERS 1998 Fraser previously courted awards chatter in this elegant tale of director James Whale’s relationship with his gardener. THE WRESTLER 2008 Aronofsky’s interest in floundering fathers and wounded birds crystallised in this search-forredemption drama. PRECIOUS 2009 Abused single mum Gabourey Sidibe fights the system in another film that finds humanity and optimism in the struggle with obesity. For more reviews visit gamesradar. com/totalfilm S E E T H I S I F Y O U LIKED in the belief that “people are amazing” and “incapable of not caring”. Not caring is certainly a challenge for viewers when watching Fraser bring such emotional clout and heat-seeking hope to Charlie, a man who asks for truth from his students, sees the best in his spiky daughter and chooses compassion in a misanthropic world. Fraser’s casting may prompt questions about whether an actor who understood Charlie’s struggle from a daily point of view might have offered a more truthful rendering of the character. But with his expressive eyes and ponderous cadence – and his own personal journey – this feels like a role he’s been waiting for his whole career. Equally, food addiction is simplified, while Charlie’s innate goodness could be viewed as a cinematic salve to make obesity more palatable to a society that still doesn’t recognise eating disorders as a disease as insidious as drug dependency or alcoholism. Additionally, the staginess of the original material is still evident, while the score at times acts as an unsophisticated emotional primer. But, quibbles and conversationstarters aside, The Whale is Aronofsky’s kindest work to date, a film that asks its audience to practise understanding, empathy and forgiveness. It unpicks wounds relating to loneliness, parental abandonment, self-destruction, marriage breakdown and sexual orientation as well as the triggers and tribulations of self-medicating with food. In that, it’s a film that takes the specific and makes it universal. And in the wake of recent global events, it’s likely to prompt catharsis and blubbing for audiences. It’s not just Fraser who will be buoyed by this project either. Stranger Things’ Sink is luminous and ambiguous as a hurt brat, while Hong Chau is emotionally devastating as a woman inescapably complicit in her friend’s decline while also trying to help; she’s both feeder and physician. She also has most of the best zingers in a screenplay (written by Hunter himself) that walks a fine line between amusing and emotive, before ultimately choosing to turn towards the light (in every way), rather than descend into the darkness. JANE CROWTHER THE VERDICT A career-best Brendan Fraser will elicit tears and discussion – and he’ll likely close out awards season with reason to celebrate. PREDICTED INTEREST CURVE™ THRILLED ENTERTAINED NODDING OFF ZZZZZZZZZ RUNNING TIME START 20 40 60 80 100 FINISH Chau brings chow Sadie sears Morton caller Camera on Pizzagate Essay Ascension 88 | TOTAL FILM | FEBRUARY 2023 TALFILM.COM/SUBS

Brendan Fraser excels as the reclusive Charlie. A24 TOTALFILM.COM FEBRUARY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 89

grasping gangster Goldilocks and her quarrelling cockney Three Bears crime family, who are also in hot pursuit of the Star in the Dark Forest. And then there’s Mulaney’s magicsnatching Jack Horner, a mobster so immoral that his Jiminy Cricket-style ‘Ethical Bug’ (voiced by Kevin McCann) can’t find his conscience. Though there’s much to chortle at here, Paul Fisher’s smart scripting also provides notably chewy characters and themes for a comic romp whose warm, painterly animation suggests a classic storybook. As Puss, Kitty and Goldilocks wrestle with their wishes (and the Dark Forest’s trippily animated carnivorous plants and mind-bending glades), the story offers some graceful, understated lessons about the difference between ‘wants’ and ‘needs’. However, what really elevates this sophisticated sequel is Banderas’ rich voicework, which reveals that, under Puss’ suave bluster, there’s a moody moggie discovering fear for the first time. For once, as he faces up to the Wolf’s ferocious blades, the stakes are as big as the laughs for the stabby tabby. KATE STABLES THE VERDICT Banderas’ feline fugitive essays the purr-fect mix of gags and gasps, ensuring that this rollicking storybook quest is the cat’s pyjamas. ★★★★★ OUT 3 FEBRUARY CINEMAS PUSS IN BOOTS: THE LAST WISH TBC Hairy tale ending…? DIRECTORS Joel Crawford, Januel Mercado STARRING Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek Pinault, Harvey Guillén, Florence Pugh SCREENPLAY Paul Fisher DISTRIBUTOR Universal RUNNING TIME 102 mins (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) cat sanctuary, Banderas’ gato macho sinks into a hilariously deadpan existential crisis. But co-directors Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado’s storytelling soon has him chasing a map leading to the fabled Wishing Star, desperate to restore his nine lives and legendary status. Puss forms a bickering trio with old flame Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek Pinault) and clingy therapy-dog Perrito (a scenestealing Harvey Guillén); setting off to rob the map from ‘Big’ Jack Horner (John Mulaney), our heroes’ quest becomes a family-friendly spaghetti western: The Good, The Bad And The Cuddly, basically. In high Shrek-franchise style, the filmmakers cram The Last Wish with galloping action laced with sly, knowing fairytale gags. Take Florence Pugh’s Holy Frijoles! After more than a decade, the feline favourite is back on the big screen, fighting, flirting and… feeling the cold breath of death on his furry shoulders. This fun, frenetic and fleet-footed sequel to Puss In Boots (2011) explores depths undreamed of in recent sweet-natured Netflix series spin-off The Adventures Of… It isn’t afraid to stray over to the dark side, as when Puss’ fatal opening scrap with a tree troll leaves him with just one of his reckless lives left. He also has an unbeatable Big Bad Wolf bounty hunter on his tail (Wagner Moura, growling out Narcos-worthy menace). Consigned to the daily litter-boxand-kibble torment of Mama Luna’s You want death stares? You got ’em… THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY 1966 Sergio Leone’s adventurers race bandits to find buried treasure… sound familiar? SHREK 2 2004 Banderas’ debut as Puss adds a strutting, sardonic humour to our band of fairytale misfits. PUSS IN BOOTS 2011 Featuring Humpty Dumpty, the furry vigilante’s first spin-off is an egg-cellent heist caper. For more reviews visit gamesradar. com/totalfilm S E E T H I S I F Y O U LIKED UNIVERSAL, STX, PICTUREHOUSE PREDICTED INTEREST CURVE™ THRILLED ENTERTAINED NODDING OFF ZZZZZZZZZ RUNNING TIME START 15 30 45 60 75 FINISH Puss gets trolled Hungry like the Wolf “Where dignity goes to die” Goldilocks’ bear necessities Big eyes, no prize Shame, shame, shame “The legend’s still big” Deathdealing duel Puss in cahoots Three amigos 90 | TOTAL FILM | FEBRUARY 2023 TALFILM.COM/SUBS

★★★★★ OUT 3 FEBRUARY CINEMAS ★★★★★ OUT 17 FEBRUARY CINEMAS SAINT OMER 12A THE SON 15 Trial stun… Hugh’s your daddy… Documentary filmmaker Alice Diop (We, La Permanence) won the Silver Lion at last year’s Venice Film Festival for her narrative debut, Saint Omer. A courtroom drama based on a true story, it calls “objection” to the tropes of Hollywood’s legal thrillers. Precise and poised, it subtly subverts as it coolly scorches. In 2016, Senegalese immigrant Fabienne Kabou was tried for the murder of her 15-month-old baby. She did not deny the charge, but claimed “witchcraft” had driven her to it. Diop attended the trial in the small town of Saint-Omer between Calais and Lille, and here puts Senegalese Frenchwoman Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda, excellent) in the witness box, with dialogue from the actual events woven into the screenplay. Instead of grandstanding speeches and heated stand-offs we get PhD student Laurence soberly and lucidly repeating her story again and again, captured in long, calm takes by DoP Claire Mathon (Portrait Of A Lady On Fire). Various witnesses – Coly’s older lover, her PhD professor – take to the stand. Meanwhile, onlooker Rama (Kayije Kagame), an academic who attends the trial and acts as a surrogate for Diop, finds her preconceptions quietly upended, as are ours. An austere film that nonetheless essays tremendous empathy, Saint Omer highlights differences of perspective while pondering issues of motherhood, immigration and colonialism. Riveting. JAMIE GRAHAM THE VERDICT Dodging courtroom cliches, Alice Diop’s fine drama dissolves the line between fact and fiction. Florian Zeller follows his Oscar-winning directorial debut The Father with another adap of one of his own plays. The helmer again teams with Anthony Hopkins, who only appears in a cameo (albeit a deliciously spiteful one). This time, the heavy lifting is shouldered by Hugh Jackman as New York attorney Peter, Laura Dern as ex-wife Kate, and Zen McGrath as their son, 17-year-old Nicholas. Wounded by his father leaving his mother for a younger woman (Vanessa Kirby, under-served) and starting a new family, Nicholas has sunk into a depression his parents can’t seem to get a handle on, let alone understand how to ease. Co-written by The Father’s Christopher Hampton, The Son betrays its theatrical origins with minimal locations and dialogue that feels stagey on screen. Even the persuasive Jackman can’t fully swing some of the lines. McGrath, meanwhile, struggles to capture the emotional range his role requires. The complexities of mental health are handled better when medical intervention becomes necessary, with Peter and Kate challenged to make the best decision for Nicholas, despite the heartbreak it causes – a scene that prompts a genuinely moving moment when Jackson and Dern crumple with self-reproach. Unfortunately, the narrative arc is foreshadowed in such a way that a third-act shock doesn’t land as deftly as intended. Hopkins becomes a highlight then, his mere minutes of screen time richer than the central trauma itself. JANE CROWTHER THE VERDICT Undoubtedly classy but curiously empty, The Son may be a spiritual sequel to The Father, but it’s not its equal. The Son tackles themes of betrayal, trauma and mental illness. Laurence (Guslagie Malanda) stands accused of infanticide. TOTALFILM.COM FEBRUARY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 91

BFI, UNIVERSAL ★★★★★ OUT 3 FEBRUARY CINEMAS ★★★★★ OUT 17 FEBRUARY CINEMAS EO TBC MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON TBC Pinning the tale on the donkey… The last of mollusc… Anomadic mule freed from the circus embarks on an improbable journey across the breadth of Europe in the latest from Polish auteur Jerzy Skolimowski (2010’s Essential Killing, 2015’s 11 Minutes), a homage of sorts to Robert Bresson’s 1966 drama Au Hasard Balthazar that would make a fine triple bill with Andrea Arnold’s Cow and pig doc Gunda. Soccer hooligans, animal-rights campaigners and a randy trucker are among the people its carrot-chomping protagonist encounters in an episodic fable that feels at times like it’s being made up on the hoof. Although there is something winningly peculiar about the whole affair, not least when Isabelle Huppert turns up as a plate-smashing countess who appears to have the hots for her priestly stepson (Lorenzo Zurzolo). It’s certainly a triumph in the art of donkey marshalling. Skolimowski expertly combines the actions of six different asses – Ettore, Hola, Marietta, Mela, Rocco and Tako, for the record – to craft a single, vsrw0wkh0mrlqv#shuirupdqfh1#Lw#lv#dovr#lqjhqlrxvo|#vkrw=#GrS#Plfkdô# Dymek juggles red-tinged equine POVs with panoramic vistas depicting a striking array of pastoral and Alpine scenery. Throughout, the titular EO is a blank slate, upon which we are free to project our own feelings about the maltreatment and exploitation of not-so-dumb animals. Some may find it all a touch manipulative, though there’s no denying EO’s eventual fate is one hell of an emotional kicker. NEIL SMITH THE VERDICT A four-legged oddity from a veteran director that’s worth cele-bray-ting, even when it makes you bridle. Some premises seem almost tailor-made to raise red flags about potentially cloying levels of whimsy. A largely stop-motionanimated mock-doc centred on sentient shells could so easily face the same cutesy-landfill fate as the likes of, say, Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium. That Marcel The Shell… in fact excels, sidestepping mawkishness, is testament to the skill of director Dean Fleischer Camp (his feature debut) and co-writers Nick Paley and Jenny Slate. Slate additionally voices the title character, as she did in the original online shorts that this feature expands upon. Living discreetly in an LA house with grandma Connie (Isabella Rossellini, giving a beautifully pitched vocal turn), our one-inch-tall hero uses MacGyver-worthy improvisational techniques to obtain resources out of sight of humans. But when documentarian Dean (Fleischer Camp) discovers the pair during an Airbnb stay, the short film he posts online goes viral and Marcel’s new-found fame presents an avenue for reuniting him with his former thriving community, which vanished in a mysterious tragedy. Shrewdly taking cues from Toy Story, the filmmakers avoid overexplaining the logistics of the shells’ existence. They also emulate the Pixar classic by mixing observational comedy with moving insights into connection, impermanence and self-determination. JOSH SLATER-WILLIAMS THE VERDICT A sweet and hilarious movie that really makes you appreciate the little things. For whom the shell tolls… BTW, ICYMI, EO is A-OK. 92 | TOTAL FILM | FEBRUARY 2023 TALFILM.COM/SUBS

Stagey at times, the film’s dingy, sepia-tinged widescreen visuals emphasise the chamber-piece feel, only varied by flickering flashbacks to the queasy aftermaths of the assaults. But it’s undeniably an acting tour de force, giving as much emphasis to Rooney Mara’s calm idealism as pregnant victim Ora as it does to Foy/Buckley’s stubborn war of words. There’s some throat-tightening tension too, as male minute-taker August (an exquisitely understated Ben Whishaw) struggles to save his beloved Ora. A fierce, defiantly uncompromising film, it packs an emotional punch that makes it far more than a finger-wagging parable about the patriarchy. KATE STABLES THE VERDICT Packed with powerhouse performances, this is an elegant if harrowing tale of a commune split open by violence. ★★★★★ OUT 10 FEBRUARY CINEMAS WOMEN TALKING 15 Faith versus freedom… DIRECTOR Sarah Polley STARRING Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Ben Whishaw SCREENPLAY Sarah Polley DISTRIBUTOR Universal RUNNING TIME 104 mins decide between forgiving their attackers – or a female exodus from the colony. Polley’s lucid, compassionate scripting makes clear this Mennonite #MeToo will involve uniquely highstakes decisions for the eight women involved. Illiterate and completely ignorant of life outside their isolated religious community, those arguing for leaving might as well be considering a moonshot. Which is why headstrong mother Salome (Claire Foy) intends to stand and fight, to protect her daughter “preyed on at night, like an animal”. Salome butts heads with Mariche (a flinty Jessie Buckley), an abused wife who is equally certain that flight is right. Their heated exchanges start a row that rages like a bushfire round the loft, sweeping away like chaff Frances McDormand’s granite granny and her dire warnings that leavers will be denied the kingdom of heaven. Their straighttalking passion sees positions shift, cueing up a series of 12 Angry Men-style reversals. As the narrative evolves, it becomes a powerful feminist fable about women’s self-determination. Actor-turned-director Sarah Polley is gloriously unafraid of challenging film conventions. Having upended the notion of ‘real’ family truths in her piercing, playful 2012 movie memoir Stories We Tell, here she turns a desperate debate by Mennonite survivors of sexual abuse into a gripping if austere drama about female freedom. Her daring one-room experiment adapts Miriam Toews’ novel inspired by a real Bolivian community whose women had been secretly doped and raped at night for years. Polley recreates the 2010 ‘fight or flight’ vote offered to survivors after the temporary arrest of the guilty men in the colony. Corralled in a hayloft after their first vote results in a tie, they have a two-day window to Agata (Judith Ivey) and Salome (Claire Foy) face a life-changing decision. 12 ANGRY MEN 1957 Sidney Lumet’s tense, tight jury-room drama thrillingly debates the value of a human life. STORIES WE TELL 2012 Polley’s poignant cine-memoir reconstructs her family’s clashing memories. SHE SAID 2022 Survivors of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual predation help the New York Times expose the monstrous mogul. For more reviews visit gamesradar. com/totalfilm S E E T H I S I F Y O U LIKED PREDICTED INTEREST CURVE™ THRILLED ENTERTAINED NODDING OFF ZZZZZZZZZ RUNNING TIME START 20 40 60 80 100 FINISH Ghosts or men? Revengers assemble Brotherly ‘love’ Eight angry women August’s awakening Daydream believers Battling for boys Sisters’ act TOTALFILM.COM FEBRUARY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 93

★★★★★ OUT 17 FEBRUARY CINEMAS THE INSPECTION 15 Training days… Boot-camp dramas: you know the drill. New recruits are bullied, sergeants scream abuse, press-ups are enforced. While these conventions are present in Elegance Bratton’s semi-autobiographical drama, his fresh viewpoint remoulds cliché into something gentler: a layered take on rejection and identity, anchored in Jeremy Pope’s magnetic lead. Pope plays Ellis French, a Black gay man rejected by his mother, Inez (Gabrielle Union). Displaced and desperate for mum’s respect, Ellis joins the Marines (circa “don’t ask, don’t tell”-era 2005), an extreme move that tests him in new ways; some expected, others less so. As sadistic sergeant Laws (Bokeem Woodbine) aspires to make “monsters” of his recruits, Bratton submits to drill-drama demands. Yet as the brutalities mount, Ellis’ refusal to be broken becomes a measure of his determination to find himself, even in a place that erodes identity. Pope brings poignancy to French, with terrific support from fellow recruit Eman Esfandi and Union, juggling fleeting pride with venomous prejudice. Bratton’s restrained direction and DOP Lachlan Milne’s naturalistic images provide air, such that the film breathes in tune with its psychological complexities. Not simply an anti-military howl, the result emerges as a nuanced character study up to the charged finale, where a slight smile speaks quiet volumes about acceptance: both its cost and the longing for it. KEVIN HARLEY THE VERDICT A resilient Pope aces the training in Bratton’s affecting military character piece: do tell everyone. Gay Marine Ellis (Jeremy Pope) faces prejudice at boot camp – and at home. HUSBAND TBC ★★★★★ OUT 3 FEBRUARY CINEMAS Billed as being “on the cusp between autofiction and documentary”, Husband sees married couple/co-directors Devorah Baum and Josh Appignanesi again turn the camera on their own relationship (after 2016’s The New Man). Baum has gone to New York with their two kids to promote her book Feeling Jewish; Appignanesi is filming the trip and commenting on his own emotional state. We’re frequently reminded of the artificiality of the filmmaking process and that the pair are adopting on-screen personas, which makes for an experience both amusing and wearying. TOM DAWSON SHE IS LOVE 15 ★★★★★ OUT 3 FEBRUARY CINEMAS, DIGITAL Patricia (Haley Bennett) hasn’t seen ex-husband Idris (Sam Riley) for a decade… until she checks into a Cornwall hotel managed by him and new girlfriend Louise (Industry standout Marisa Abela). The former marrieds gradually unpack what went wrong between them in a comic-tinged drama that plays more like a sketch than a fleshed-out feature (one lacking a credible third act). It’s heartfelt and occasionally funny, but Brit director Jamie Adams’ (Black Mountain Poets) semiimprovised approach leaves Riley and Bennett floundering. Even at a brisk 75 minutes, it feels padded out. JAMES MOTTRAM THAT TIME I GOT REINCARNATED AS A SLIME THE MOVIE: SCARLET BOND 15 ★★★★★ OUT NOW CINEMAS This spin-off movie from the popular anime show offers a dynamic adventure, albeit one that’s only really accessible to existing fans. Steeped in previous story arcs, it follows Hiro, last of the ogres, who has to confront his own rage when he encounters the orcs responsible for killing his species. For all the rich mythology of Demon Lords and evolutionary powers, the story suffers from a focus on Hiro’s internal struggle rather than a clear external threat, leading to a highly emotional but somewhat anticlimactic ending. MATT LOOKER THE LAIR TBC ★★★★★ OUT NOW SHUDDER Director Neil Marshall rose to fame with the carnage and camaraderie of Dog Soldiers and The Descent. After TV success (Game Of Thrones, Hannibal) but movie missteps (2019’s Hellboy), he goes back to basics with his hit-and-miss latest. It’s set in Afghanistan, where bloodthirsty underground creatures set upon a mixed gang of British and American squaddies led by RAF pilot Kate (played by co-writer Charlotte Kirk). The try-hard dialogue often grates and the lead performance is stiff and unexciting, but the good news is that the action and splatter are up there with Marshall’s best. JOEL HARLEY 94 | TOTAL FILM | FEBRUARY 2023 TALFILM.COM/SUBS

★★★★★ OUT NOW CINEMAS ★★★★★ OUT 24 FEBRUARY CINEMAS ALICE, DARLING 15 WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT? 12A Toxic shocker… Assisted-marriage story… An atypically doleful performance from Pitch Perfect frontwoman Anna Kendrick brings an air of uneasiness to this disquieting feature debut from director Mary Nighy (daughter of actor Bill). And with good reason, too: the eponymous Alice (Kendrick), a young woman living in Toronto, is trapped in a relationship with artist Simon (Charlie Carrick) so coercive it has her literally tearing her hair out. So malign is his influence that she feels only guilt at the prospect of a week away with her gal pals. Her terror of riling him compels Alice to concoct a work-related excuse. But will a lakeside vacation with Sophie (Wunmi Mosaku) and Tess (Kaniehtiio Horn) give her the reality check she needs? Or is she too conditioned to see what everyone else can: that her British beau is in actuality a pretentious, gaslighting douchebag? There’s much to admire in Kendrick’s vulnerable portrayal, which was doubtless informed by her own experience of a toxic and abusive ex. It’s a shame, then, that the film around her – the sophomore work of screenwriter Alanna Francis (2019’s The Rest Of Us) – isn’t quite as persuasive. Horn and Mosaku do what they can with their underwritten characters, but Carrick’s hissable baddie at times feels straight out of panto. A plot thread involving a local girl who has mysteriously gone missing, meanwhile, is a metaphor looking for a purpose. NEIL SMITH THE VERDICT A pertinent psychological thriller, whose more prosaic elements are alleviated by Anna Kendrick’s brave, accolade-worthy performance. Drawing on her own experiences of living in Pakistan with then-husband Imran Khan, writer/producer Jemima Khan crafts an account of British-Pakistani culture in the form of a Working Title romcom very much in the Richard Curtis mould. Add a plot device lifted from When Harry Met Sally…, and this entertaining yarn proves to be an apt melting pot of familiar influences. Directed by Shekhar Kapur (Elizabeth), it stars Lily James as unluckyin-love documentarian Zoe, who decides to film her childhood neighbour and best friend Kaz (Shazad Latif) after he agrees to an assisted marriage. So begins a journey that takes in family-arranged introductions, speed dating and a trip to Pakistan for Kaz’s eventual nuptials. Capturing it all on camera, Zoe begins to wonder whether this “simmer then boil” approach, in which couples find love along the way, might actually work. Unsurprisingly, much of the fun lies in highlighting the differences between the two cultures at hand, most often skewered by Zoe’s enthusiastic but ignorant mum Cath (played by a scene-stealing Emma Thompson). While the film’s predictable ending arguably undoes some of its many arguments about the viability of an assisted (not ‘forced’ or ‘arranged’) marriage, Khan’s script works best as an exploration of - and ultimately love letter to – Pakistani traditions and practices. MATT LOOKER THE VERDICT Formulaic but entertaining romcom fare that positively shifts the dial on depictions of Pakistani culture. Just good friends? Zoe (Lily James) and Kaz (Shazad Latif) are about to find out. Can Anna Kendrick’s Alice cleave her toxic relationship? CRUNCHYROLL, DARTMOUTH FILMS, LIONSGATE, SHUDDER, SIGNATURE, SONY, STUDIOCANAL TOTALFILM.COM FEBRUARY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 95

★★★★★ OUT 24 FEBRUARY CINEMAS BROKER 12A Minor gem… You will never meet a kinder bunch of illegal baby traffickers than the makeshift family that Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda assembles in his first Korean-language feature. Broker is a road movie-slash-crime yarn about a duo of infant sellers (Song Kang-ho, Gang Dong-won) who team up with their latest acquisition’s birth mother (Lee Ji-eun) to find new parents for her child. Centred on church-run “baby boxes” that allow new parents in South Korea to safely abandon offspring they are unable to care for, Broker finds Kore-eda flirting with genre elements (dogged cops, a murdered gangster) in ways that suggest a darker film. Yet the director of Shoplifters (2018) and Catherine Deneuve drama The Truth (2019) is too much of a humanist to maintain the pretence for long. A runaway orphan and a battered van bring a warm, Little Miss Sunshine vibe to a story that you don’t so much follow as fall in love with. It helps that Parasite star Song has more than enough roguish charm to soften his cash-strapped opportunism, and that pop singer Lee brings both sadness and spikiness to the child donor with whom he colludes. In truth, however, there’s not one character who isn’t drawn with some compassion. A touching interlude ensures that even Doona Bae’s hard-headed policewoman gets to show her gentler side. NEIL SMITH THE VERDICT Misfits join forces to find a foundling a home in Kore-eda’s generous and empathetic drama. CREATURE 12A ★★★★★ OUT 24 FEBRUARY CINEMAS By Oscar-winning documentarian Asif Kapadia (Amy, Senna), this elegant film of choreographer Akram Khan’s 2021 ballet – about a lovestruck human “creature” in an Arctic lab – is a tender, visceral piece. Kapadia’s camerawork makes lead dancer Jeffrey Cirio’s animalistic solos feel sharply expressive and deftly captures the Creature’s love for downtrodden cleaner Marie. But the dystopian setting, droning electronic score and opaque symbolism (the Apollo 11 take-off makes several baffling soundtrack appearances) suggest that probably only hardcore dance enthusiasts will puzzle out its true meaning. KATE STABLES SHOTGUN WEDDING TBC ★★★★★ OUT NOW PRIME VIDEO Following Marry Me, Jennifer Lopez’s wedding-flick output continues with this daft but harmless romp charting the misadventures of engaged couple Darcy (J.Lo) and Tom (Josh Duhamel, replacing the beleaguered Armie Hammer) when their nuptials on an island in the Philippines are interrupted by gun-toting pirates. He’s a groomzilla, she’s got cold feet… but maybe a little murder and mayhem can make them simpatico? Like The Lost City, Shotgun Wedding trades on the nuclear charm of its lead, decent chemistry and some Romancing The Stone-esque peril. Serviceable. JANE CROWTHER YOU RESEMBLE ME 15 ★★★★★ OUT 3 FEBRUARY CINEMAS Former journalist Dina Amer explores the human behind the headlines in her fitfully revelatory portrait of the woman dubbed (falsely…) “France’s first female suicide bomber”. Dramatising Hasna Aït Boulahcen’s role in the 2015 Paris terrorist atrocities, Amer is at her best exploring Hasna’s formative years, from joyful sisterhood to familial abuse and dislocation. The film’s latter half trades youthful energy for sketchily distracting deepfake experiments, but not before suggesting how displacement can breed desperation: even at its crudest, Amer’s character study stirs vital questions. KEVIN HARLEY SHADOW MASTER 18 ★★★★★ OUT NOW DVD, BD, DIGITAL Prachya Pinkaew, the director who brought Tony Jaa’s incredible stunt skills to global attention in 2003’s Ong-Bak, serves as producer for this similar – on the surface, at least – actioner, which serves as a showcase for new martial-arts talent D.Y. Sao. Alas, Sao is clearly more choreographer than actor, struggling to muster much screen presence in his role as a newly appointed night watchman given supernatural powers by a Death God. It all adds up to a nonsensical narrative saddled with cheap effects, which sadly undermines the otherwise impressive fighting feats on display. MATT LOOKER Lee Ji-eun, Gang Dong-won and Song Kang-ho are left holding the baby. ALTITUDE, AMAZON, BFI, LIONSGATE, MODERN FILMS, MUSICFILMNETWORK, NEW WAVE FILMS, PICTUREHOUSE, WILDCARD 96 | TOTAL FILM | FEBRUARY 2023 TALFILM.COM/SUBS

PLANE TBC ★★★★★ OUT NOW CINEMAS He’s saved the world a few times already, so you’d imagine that landing a plane full of passengers during a nerve-shredding electrical storm would be peanuts for Gerard Butler. And you’d be right. But that’s just the warmup act for this wham-bam action thriller directed by Jean-François Richet (Mesrine) and co-starring Mike Colter. Bone-crunching and brain-draining, Plane is standard Cannon-era B-movie silliness glitzed up with a blockbuster sheen. It’s a raucous and reckless good time where you will learn nothing and be thankful for it. Rarely, these days, are we treated to this kind of pure, dumb fun. KEN MCINTYRE I GET KNOCKED DOWN TBC ★★★★★ OUT 3 FEBRUARY CINEMAS One-time Chumbawamba frontman Dunstan Bruce’s cheerful and unrepentantly radical film memoir scores highest when nostalgically raking over Bruce’s anarcho-pop past with his ‘Tubthumping’ chums. Their journey from a Leeds squat to chart-topping, politician-soaking squabblers is a wild ride, richly stuffed with archive footage. But Bruce’s inclusion of narcissistic art-school-style stunts gets tedious pretty quickly. And only hardcore fans will sing and dance at the inclusion of his shouty new pensioner-punk band, Interrobang. KATE STABLES ATOMIC HOPE TBC ★★★★★ OUT 17 FEBRUARY CINEMAS Subtitled Inside The Pro-Nuclear Movement, Frankie Fenton’s doc mounts an engaging but limited take on a heated issue. Opening with a Japanese nuclear engineer’s complex feelings about nuclear power, Fenton then gives the stage to scientists and self-styled “rebels” advocating for thorium as an answer to climate change. Whether they are staging demos or debunking fears, their fervently held positions make for heartfelt but frustrating viewing. Stressing rhetoric and slogans over rigorous study, Fenton’s portrait risks looking more like a slickly emotive promo reel than a proper investigation. KEVIN HARLEY TOWN OF STRANGERS TBC ★★★★★ OUT 10 FEBRUARY CINEMAS Experimental filmmaker Treasa O’Brien’s doc explores the effects of immigration on the small town of Gort, which boasts the biggest number of different nationalities in Ireland. If O’Brien’s attempts to blur real life and fiction aren’t always successful, there’s still much to savour. Taking a meta approach, the director auditions participants to be in the film, which emerges as a series of charming interviews and improvised scenarios. The result is a nuanced portrait of what “home” means, where a sense of displacement can co-exist with a sense of belonging. MATT LOOKER ★★★★★ OUT 10 FEBRUARY CINEMAS BLUE JEAN 15 The hateful ’80s… Afestival favourite and winner of four British Independent Film Awards (from 13 nominations), this feature debut by writer/director Georgia Oakley is set in Thatcher’s Britain, a time when homophobia was part and parcel of the mainstream. The year is 1988, with Section 28 banning local authorities from “promoting homosexuality”. Gym teacher Jean (Rosy McEwen), closeted at work, fears for her job at a Tyneside comprehensive – especially when 15-year-old student Lois (Lucy Halliday) starts frequenting the lesbian bar where Jean goes with her girlfriend, Viv (Kerrie Hayes). Some admittedly well-placed news reports aside, the drama ducks easy clichés, with DOP Victor Seguin opting for soft pastels where most would favour hard-edged and sullen, given the working-class milieu and thorny subject. Jean is no moral crusader righting wrongs. She’s passive, paralysed by fear, and when Lois is bullied for being gay, Jean is unable to step forward as an ally, being so used to merging into the background. Given the strength of McEwen’s performance (her every microscopic movement illuminates the fear many lived with in those dark days), it’s highly unlikely she’ll be fading from view any time soon. Previously best known for The Alienist, she’s bound for stardom. JAMIE GRAHAM THE VERDICT Reminding us that the ’80s weren’t all Rubik’s Cubes and mixtapes, this assured queer drama chooses nuance over nostalgia. Rosy McEwen gives a pensive performance in Georgia Oakley’s absorbing drama. TOTALFILM.COM FEBRUARY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 97

★★★★★ OUT 17 FEBRUARY CINEMAS, CURZON HOME CINEMA ★★★★★ OUT 24 FEBRUARY CINEMAS NOSTALGIA 12A JOYLAND 15 Live and yearn… Making a move… Returning to Naples for the first time in four decades to care for his ailing mother, Felice (Pierfrancesco Favino) embarks on a journey of rediscovery in Mario Martone’s handsomely shot drama. In a leisurely opening hour – one that could double as an advert for the Neapolitan tourist board, were it not for the city’s criminal elements impinging upon his wistful wanderings – he steadily reacclimates to the place he once called home. As teenage memories flood in, he seeks to reconcile with former best friend Oreste (Tommaso Ragno), whose name alone makes friendly faces turn flinty. And those soft-focus flashbacks gain a harder edge as we discover why Felice left in the first place. “Sometimes distant memories are like ghosts,” says local priest Don Luigi (a terrific Francesco Di Leva), playfully mocking Felice’s rose-tinted reminiscences of his adolescence. If absence makes the heart grow fonder, Martone suggests, perhaps familiarity has the opposite effect? The idea of nostalgia being selective with the truth is nothing new, but the veteran helmer is canny enough to ensure this is more than a simple warning about the danger of being seduced by the past. Fascinating subtexts swirl around the relatively straightforward plot, and if there’s a certain inevitability to the film’s ultimate destination, Favino’s subtly layered performance provides the perfect guide for the journey. CHRIS SCHILLING THE VERDICT Martone’s Palme d’Or nominee is an elegant, evocative return. Turns out Nostalgia is all it’s cracked up to be. A worthy Queer Palm winner at Cannes ’22, Saim Sadiq’s Pakistani debut made headlines when it was banned at home, then cut for release. But although Sadiq’s drama of transgender desire busts boundaries, Joyland is also the gentlest of groundbreakers: a sharply funny and occasionally sorrowful character piece, it anatomises traditional and modern values with scrupulous nuance. Ali Junejo plays Haider, a stay-at-home husband caring for his nieces while his wife Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq) works. His father (Salmaan Peerzada) disapproves, then disapproves doubly when Haider finds work at an ‘erotic’ dance theatre. While Mumtaz negotiates homefront duties, Haider starts hoofing – and soon falls for trans performer Biba (Alina Khan). As studies of flawed yet complex individuals at transitional life points emerge, even grumpy dad draws some sympathy. Generous performances match Sadiq’s equitable pitch, with Khan’s all-in presence and Junejo’s suggestion of self-realisation providing a core narrative tension. Around this push-pull, Sadiq’s elegantly expressive compositions sometimes show his characters hemmed-in; elsewhere, blasts of colour and movement add palpable surges of release, bolstered by music attuned to the emotional stakes. The patchwork plotting leaves some characters’ fates dangling, frustratingly, but Sadiq’s resistance to glib resolutions isn’t without purpose. As the eloquently sad climax implies, myopic traditionalism doesn’t readily embrace progress. KEVIN HARLEY THE VERDICT Sadiq makes a fine debut with his considered transgender drama, executed with care and compassion. Ali Junejo and Alina Khan in Saim Sadiq’s groundbreaking feature debut. Felice faces some home truths on his return to Naples. 98 | TOTAL FILM | FEBRUARY 2023 TALFILM.COM/SUBS STUDIO SOHO, CURZON, UNIVERSAL, DOCHOUSE, DAZZLER, SIGNATURE, BLUE FINCH FILM

★★★★★ OUT NOW CINEMAS M3GAN 15 Walkin’, talkin’, livid doll… The title of this Blumhouse-backed demon-doll caper is an acronym for “Model 3 Generative Android”. Or to put it another way, M3GAN is a “Barbie on steroids”. It’s this vein of knowing humour that sets the movie apart from the Annabelles and Chuckys of this world. Director Gerard Johnstone (2014’s Housebound) and writer Akela Cooper (Malignant) always have a snappy line or droll music cue up their sleeves to tickle the audience. “Remember this moment,” toy mogul David (Ronny Chieng) tells underlings when inventor Gemma (Allison Williams) unveils the angelic-looking A.I. companion she’s been working on. “It’s the moment we kicked Hasbro right in the dick!” That the robot in question uses David Guetta’s ‘Titanium’ for lullaby purposes adds more laughs to the mix, as does the way she precedes a bout of samurai-style slaughter with dance moves that were born to go viral. If it’s shivers you’re after, though, you might want to return M3GAN unopened. We know from the moment Gemma presents her latest creation to orphaned niece Cady (Violet McGraw) that this big-eyed automaton’s a wrong ’un, which somewhat scuppers attempts to generate tension. M3GAN herself – a combo of animatronics, CGI and the voice/body double act of Jenna Davis and Amie Donald – is a pleasingly creepy figure with a talent for deadpan put-downs. But if she’s to spawn a franchise, she’ll need some upgrades. NEIL SMITH THE VERDICT Precision-built to make you chortle, M3GAN is a l0t of 4un. On the frights front, however, it’s basically a Furby. Uh-oh, h3r3 com3s troubl3… NASCONDINO TBC ★★★★★ OUT NOW CINEMAS Shot over a four-year period, Italian filmmaker Victoria Fiore’s debut feature is a “creative documentary”, which explores the world of charismatic 12-year-old Entoni, who lives in the Spanish Quarters district of Naples. His father is in prison and his grandmother is a former crime boss; Entoni is thus the type of high-risk child that authorities are seeking to remove from households involved in organised crime. Neither demonising nor glamorising its subjects, Nascondino is a vibrantly shot portrait of both an individual family and an underprivileged community and its collective rituals. TOM DAWSON NEXT EXIT 15 ★★★★★ OUT 20 FEBRUARY DIGITAL After learning that death is not the end, the world struggles to come to terms with a radically changed state of existence in this sci-fi road movie. When a doctor (Karen Gillan, plus dodgy accent) begins conducting experiments on the afterlife, strangers Rose (Katie Parker) and Teddy (Rahul Kohli) decide to up sticks and volunteer for medically monitored euthanasia. Directed by Mali Elfman (yes, daughter of Danny), this is a haunting, bittersweet and sharply observed dark comedy, mining laughs from the savage gallows humour of its leading pair, who have chemistry for miles. JOEL HARLEY SERIOUSLY RED 15 ★★★★★ OUT 13 FEBRUARY DIGITAL The life and work of Dolly Parton run through this quirky Australian comedy drama like a streak of peroxide, serving not just as inspiration for dye-hard fan Red (Krew Boylan), but for anyone needing a spot of personal advice. An impromptu performance leads Red to explore whether being a Dolly impersonator is a way to make a living, finding comfort and confidence along the way. Offbeat laughs sit uneasily alongside emotional moments, but the smart script highlights the contradictions found in discovering yourself while pretending to be someone else. MATT LOOKER OSCAR PETERSON: BLACK + WHITE E ★★★★★ OUT NOW DVD, DIGITAL “The best ivory-box player I’ve ever heard,” said Count Basie of iconic Canadian jazz pianist Oscar Peterson. Yet this solid, archive-packed and frankly adoring portrait of his rise from wartime Montreal prodigy to racism-fighting international star skimps on his legendary performances, in favour of concert tributes by Toronto musicians. Peterson’s incredible range and keyboard technique inspired jazz greats like Quincy Jones and Herbie Hancock, who join a chorus of fond but increasingly repetitive praise here from famous fans including Billy Joel and Branford Marsalis. KATE STABLES TOTALFILM.COM FEBRUARY 2023 | TOTAL FILM | 99

SONY/CRITERION, PAR AMOUNT, 20TH CENTURY STUDIOS, POWERHOUSE 1985 ★★★★★ OUT NOW BD EXTRAS ★★★★★ Commentary, Documentary, Featurettes, Video essay, Deleted scenes, AFI seminar, Essay THE BREAKFAST CLUB 15 Hey, hey, new Blu-ray… I t’s not as laugh-out-loud as Fast Times At Ridgemont High. It doesn’t feel as authentic as Dazed And Confused. The finale completely betrays Ally Sheedy’s proto-goth character, Allison. Yet say what you will about The Breakfast Club, few films have communicated so effectively the struggles teenagers have navigating social groups and living up (or even down) to the expectations of their parents. As good as the film’s central quintet – Molly Ringwald (the “princess”), Emilio Estevez (the“athlete”), Anthony Michael Hall (the “brain”), Sheedy (the “basket case”) and Judd Nelson (the “criminal”) - may be, the MVP is unquestionably writer/director John Hughes. While there’s a handful of lines that sound like a middle-aged writer’s idea of how kids talk (“Yo, waste-oid! You’re not gonna blaze up in here!”), where the script excels is in making its stock teenage characters and the emotional turmoil that drives them so relatable. “It’s my theory that he has a little PTSD about those teenage years,” reflects Ringwald in the extras on how Hughes pulled off that feat. “There’s just something about those years [that] stayed very vivid for him.” Whatever the case, it made Hughes the voice of a generation and The Breakfast Club a beloved all-timer. ANTON VAN BEEK THE VERDICT Criterion’s upgraded Blu-ray package makes spending time in Saturday detention an absolute dream. PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES 15 1987 ★★★★★ OUT NOW 4K UHD EXTRAS ★★★★★ Documentary, Featurettes, Deleted/extended scenes, Audition footage It might not be the very best of John Hughes’ films, but this festive classic is easily the funniest, allowing Steve Martin and the late John Candy to bounce off one another to hilarious and, ultimately, heartfelt effect. But while the film never fails to put a smile on viewers’ faces, this UHD outing is unlikely to do the same, thanks to an ugly, overprocessed 4K transfer. Not even an exclusive bonus disc housing 75 minutes of deleted scenes can save this package from going off the rails. ANTON VAN BEEK REMEMBER THE NIGHT PG 1940 ★★★★★ OUT NOW BD EXTRAS ★★★★★ Commentary, Video essays, Radio adaps, Vintage short, Booklet, Poster Four years before they teamed up in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray shared the screen in this sparkling romcom about a district attorney who falls for the shoplifter he’s been prosecuting. Although writer Preston Sturges was unhappy with the changes director Mitchell Leisen made to soften his script, his wit still shines through all the way to the film’s unexpectedly bittersweet ending. Extras include a detailed appreciation of Stanwyck’s life and career. ANTON VAN BEEK TITANIC 12A 1997 ★★★★★ OUT 10 FEBRUARY CINEMAS Sailing back into cinemas, newly remastered, James Cameron’s world-conquering take on the RMS Titanic’s tragic maiden voyage still wows 25 years after its original UK release. A fresh-faced Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet bring the romantic spark as class-crossed lovers Jack and Rose, while Billy Zane has moustache-twirling, scenerydevouring fun as Rose’s dastardly fiancé. But it’s that final act, as the “unsinkable” luxury liner hits an iceberg, that truly haunts and thrills, brilliantly capturing the courage, carnage and chaos of the real-life disaster. JAMES MOTTRAM RUN, MAN, RUN 12 1968 ★★★★★ OUT NOW BD EXTRAS ★★★★★ Original theatrical cut, Commentaries, Featurette, Alt opening, Booklet The final entry in director Sergio Sollima’s trilogy of ‘Zapata westerns’, RMR sees Tomas Milian reprise his role from The Big Gundown (1966) as Mexican peon Cuchillo. Here he scampers into Texas in search of buried treasure, pursued by his fearless girlfriend, a US ex-lawman, a ruthless bandit, French hired killers and a Salvation Army officer. Flaunting its countercultural politics, this picaresque tale is mainly played for laughs, though Sollima’s widescreen flourishes conjure an epic vibe. Includes uncut and theatrical versions. TOM DAWSON Teen spirit: Emilio’s “athlete” and Molly’s “princess” captivated a generation. 100 | TOTAL FILM | FEBRUARY 2023 TALFILM.COM/SUBS